Getting Healthy – A Simple Way
Now that “Healthy Without Health Insurance” is out on Kindle, people keep asking me what it’s about. I tell them it’s about getting healthy simply, cheaply, and effectively. I also tell them it has a new paradigm for real health and well-being – that if you give your body the right information, it can regenerate itself very well – in ways you might really like.
But some people want to know more. Here are a few of the major points in the book:
1. Health care is our Titanic, heading for the ice floes while we re-embroider the deck chairs. People have no choice but to protect themselves – to get as healthy as they can. A strategy of denial may work for a while. Unfortunately, in the end stuff that’s denied tends to come back to kick you in the head.
2. The body regenerates itself quickly, with most of it replaced within three to four weeks. The science fiction stories of people waking up each morning internally changed are truer than people know. Since we remake ourselves constantly, we have a fantastic opportunity to rebuild ourselves – the way we want.
3. Your body is a giant information network – a little bit like the movie the Matrix – where new (often unconscious) information continuously updates genetic and metabolic information to literally remake us. Health and aging are not the machine breaking down, but our regeneration not working right. Your aging knee does not slowly tear and wear – it just gets to the point where its continuous remake fails. That day can be very much delayed if we use it in ways that allow proper restoration and regeneration.
4. Rest is exciting because even during “passive” periods we are continuously remade. You’re getting a newly rewired brain while you sleep – and if you give the body proper information – as when you walk for twenty minutes – you’ll grow new brain cells while you sleep.
5. Exercise is any use of voluntary muscle – including reading this sentence out loud. How much housework you do cuts down breast cancer risk. Once you realize what exercise is, you can put it into virtually all the parts of your day – I’m typing this standing up at a standing desk. Moving after meals can really change weight, because it changes the body’s energy equation – and how insulin gets produced and fat stuffed into your belly.
6. Longevity is about lifestyle. Lifestyle is far more than Johnny-One-Note approaches of “eat this not that” or go out and run three miles every day. The body is an information system. Put a group of simple things together and they really work well – including weight control.
7. The longest lived populations in the world are in the U.S. – including a large population that lives in one of the more polluted parts of the country. It’s not our toxic environment that’s killing us – it’s our lifestyle. What you do is what you become.
8. In terms of overall longevity, medical care has been a relative side show compared to nutrition, education, sanitation, and vaccination. Health care should be about health – physical, social, mental and spiritual well-being – rather than producing more of itself.
9. Social connection is one of the biggest factors in getting people well and keeping them alive longer – and gets hardly any press.
10. As the health care system fails, how you navigate the system becomes more and more critical. Savvy users will do better. In the meantime, there are basic health signs to monitor even if you can’t always find enough money to fully get by. Keep in mind that the best way to stay out of in the expensive insides of a hospital is to get and stay healthy.
11. Life is fast. A python can double the size of its heart in 24 hours. We take three days to replace most of ours. Not the quickest operator, but not shabby, either.
12. Part of the information network that makes us are the 100 trillion plus critters – there are that many bacteria in our guts alone – that live within the human ecosystem. Now that some scientists argue that half our DNA comes from bacteria and viruses, it’s time to pay attention to our co-inhabitants – who clearly have been modifying our immunity and much else for a very, very long time. If a few lactobacilli can prevent a mouse from feeling stress or getting depressed, our many internal organisms – and how we eat and treat them – are really important. So far we know they’re part of asthma, ulculerative colitis and ulcer, but this is a much bigger story.
Bottom Line
What you do is what you become. “Healthy Without Health Insurance” provides you a simple program to regenerate your body – the way you want.
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