Your Lifestyle Is Your Medicine

What is disease really caused from?

Understanding this requires thinking about the true, or “root” causes of premature death and disease. For instance, even as I write this, federal data just released indicate that diabetes has moved up as the third leading “cause” of death in the United States, behind heart disease and cancer. Yes, it's true that your lifestyle or what your eating and what your doing is what shapes you. 

What most of us don't know is that the way you live your life will determine how long you live. That means "what you eat and how active you are" will determine how healthy you are. Many of us get the part about "what we eat", but what does activity have to do with your health? If you keep all your muscles active, all your muscles will retain their strength, but if you are only using some of your muscles the other muscles not used will shrink and become flabby. Those muscles will eventually be used to fuel the body's need for energy and that will cause you to become weaker over time. Becoming weaker over time will weaken the immune system and invite illness and disease to enter your body causing premature death. When you allow your percentage of muscle mass to shrink, your body mass will become the larger body mass and then your body fat will rob you of your energy, you become less active and you will build up more and more fat. 

Not eating a well-balanced diet will reduce your energy level and will also cause you to become less active; so both, your food and your active levels are the deciding factors in your health and how long you're going to live.

But the reality is, most diabetes is type 2, and nearly all type 2 diabetes is preventable through a combination of eating well, being active, and controlling weight. In other words, type 2 diabetes is not really a cause, it’s an effect. So, too, for heart disease, cancer, stroke, dementia, most lung disease, and so on. These diseases are the effect of the way you live. All that money you spend at the doctor's office is probably caused by the way you are living your life.

The diseases we tend to think of as the causes of chronic misery and premature death are actually effects of your lifestyle.

The rest, as they say, is history.

One of my favorite studies showed that those people who didn’t smoke, ate vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and little meat routinely, were physically active, and had a healthy weight, were 80 percent less likely to develop ANY major chronic disease than those who went the other way. Just four modifiable factors could explain away 80 percent of the risk for getting ANY major chronic disease. That’s a very big deal.

Sometimes the best defense of the human body resides with the body taking action. So it's not about what medicine can do for you, it's about what you can do yourself to make your body a better place for you to live.

 How Do You Make the Best Choices for You?

While others may use different terminology, the simple fact is that where people live the longest and the best around the world, they are firing on these six cylinders every time. They eat well, are active, tend not to smoke, get enough sleep, aren’t overwhelmed by stress, and have strong social ties. Fire on those six cylinders and the path to more years in life and more life in years is the open road before you.

But of course, firing on those six cylinders is easier said than done, for a number of reasons. First of all, no everyone knows when their body is working properly. Your body is designed to work even under poor conditions, it just won't work as good or as long, but it will always work enough to get by.

You can know when your body is working properly, by the amount of energy you have. This is the first sign that your body may have a problem. Another sign would be weight gain. If your gaining weight as an adult and there's no reason for it, your body is having a problem. These two signs are easily overlooked. We need to be aware of the health signs our body is giving us.

Verywell, in turn, is a daily source of practical information about health—including frequent guidance about these very factors, and how to put them to use in your own life.

I added a few sentences to this very well crafted article by VeryWell.com.

If you really want to lose your body fat than look for my e-books at the websites listed below. You'll get information on Healthy eating, exercise, and diet. Instead of spending hours on the internet reading dozens of posts, you can save time by picking up one of my e-books. 

There are two e-books. “How Bad Do You Want To Lose Weight?” is available at all the online bookstores selling for $1.99. Go to any of the websites below and search the title to find my e-book. This book gives you all you need to lose weight without spending money on gym memberships, diet plans or meal plans. Look for my book. at Amazon.com, B&N.com, iBooks, Kobo.com, Scribd.com, or Gardner Books in the U.K.

My new e-book is available on Smashwords.com, just type “getting to a Healthy Weight” in the search box at the top of the home page.