Sounds like a stupid question, right?
"The healthy guy"
Everybody has something that they're naturally good at. It's something that others point out about us with envy, while we barely realize that it's even a skill. It may be that dude who's an amazing cook, and responds to compliments with a confused look and "...it's just an omelette", or that lady who can organize her messiest friend's closet in 30mins flat, just for fun. When people talk about you to others, how to they describe you? What makes you stand out in your group of friends?
A longtime friend can build his on PC out of whatever parts he finds, and often takes them apart and rebuilts them to suit his needs. Another friend is able to talk to anyone, on any topic, and make them open up and feel comfortable. In my eyes, these are two amazing skills and really impress me, although they "come naturally" (not exactly; more on this later) and seem like no big deal to the people doing them.
To most of my friends and acquaintances, I've always been "the healthy guy". Health is important to me, and my habits and lifestyle reflect the value I place on being healthy. However trivial they seem to me, my health-conscious decisions always seem to impress others. Until recently, I haven't even been aware that this is a skill that others can benefit greatly from—to me, it's always seemed self-evident. So I started wondering; how did I become the "healthy guy"?
Goals and habitual thought patterns
At some point in my life, I decided that health was REALLY important to me. It's one of those things that I thought about often enough that it became a "core value", something central to the thought patters that drove my habits. It became part of my paradigm. I started building habits around these thought patterns, to reflect my beliefs about health. What does it mean to be healthy? How does perfect health feel, and how can I feel that way more often? Why are some people healthy, and some people unhealthy?
This investigation started my imagination going on different aspects of health, how it manifests, how we sometimes block it, and how we can invite more of it into our lives. I started gaining a deeper understanding of what it meant to be healthy and what control it held over our lives and how we could exercise control to create more of it. I saw healthy people and saw how they lived, and I also saw unhealthy people. The differences between them eventually became quite obvious, and I started seeing how the way people habitually act—as well as the thought patterns behind those habits—define their relationship to health.
Looking back, it's clear that the health I enjoy today is 100% thanks to the decisions I made at that time.
A tiger doesn't wake up saying "okay I'm gonna get up, I'm gonna work hard, do my affirmations... he just gets up and is a tiger, and does whatever tigers do. He's utterly and completely a tiger." -Stuart Wilde
Health is our natural state
Basically, my investigation has shown that health is the most natural state in existence. Nature does not make mistakes; every creature is born in the image of our creator, and since we all stem from the same source, we're all constantly and intimately connected to that source.
Let's look at the human body, for example. The human body is an incredibly sophisticated series of interconnected systems working constantly in perfect harmony. It was created in the womb of our mothers, without any blueprints or conscious effort as to its design or functions it was to perform. Yet, here we are, perfect living creatures. What happens when you cut yourself? It heals. What happens when you're tired? You sleep and wake up refreshed. Do you have to remember to breathe, or squeeze your heart muscles to pump blood through your system, or consciously digest the food in your stomach? No! It all happens naturally, without any conscious effort. In fact, the less conscious effort you put into these activities, the more smoothly and efficiently they operate. The closer we become to living naturally—according to our body's natural rhythm—the healthier we are.
The Buddha, who lived extremely simply and ascetically for the majority of his life, lived to the ripe age of 82 nearly one and a half millenia ago. He actively preached, ate extremely sparingly, and traveled regularly until his dying day—all this despite the lack of any of the common modern conceptions of healthy lifestyle such as medicine, a balanced diet, or a clear exercise regimen.
So what's the deal? If health is natural and automatic, why are some people unhealthy?
Let's find out more about how people encourage or block their natural health in Part II!
P.s.: check out another great post on staying healthy by 