The Power Within

The American health-care system is not the answer to poor health and unhappiness. The system is an illness-care system, which has little to do with correcting unhealthy behavior and environmental factors. This is why an improvement in your personal health and fitness is directly related to changes in you. You must learn to take care of yourself long before you start losing parts of yourself. The implication of this statement is that millions of people sit back as if our medical system will keep them healthy and strong. They allow themselves to be dazzled by the dramatic changes in technological and bio-medical advances as though the machines will somehow rescue them. CAT-scanners, insulin infusion pumps, and nuclear-powered hearts are truly fantastic advances and have helped to prolong living in certain life-threatening conditions.

We have the power (and the intelligence) to live a positive and constructive lifestyle. The power is within us. This book explores the thinking that is necessary to stop procrastinating about starting a new way of living if we really want to. The determination to exercise regularly, for example, is within you. Too often, though, this power is pushed aside. In its place are the costs of gluttony and reckless styles of living. The end result is the continued patching up of the mind (particularly, the psychological and spiritual dimensions of disease) and body (by drugs and surgical procedures) and the return to the battlefield of life and living. This is not the answer to society's health and fitness problems.

I am convinced that the answer lies within us. It is within you to change, especially if you want to lead a happier, healthier life. The "enemy within" bears repeating. We are responsible for much of the premature death and disability in this country, yet we can learn how to live differently. We can learn how to open our minds and measure ourselves against our own thinking, knowledge, and compassion for living. We can change this seemingly inevitable outcome that our lifestyle has resulted in a higher risk of illness and disease from cancer, arthritis, diabetes, and heart disease.

I have written this book with the firm belief that with one single decision we can begin to address the root of the problem. Then, we can decide whether or not we want to improve and move on to a healthier lifestyle. The time is right to do something about your health and fitness. In fact, according to Donald B. Ardell and his High Level Wellness book, "The only tyrant you face is your own inertia and absence of will.--" Take cigarette smoking as an example, your own inertia and absence of willpower keeps the habit alive. Imagine this single largest preventable cause of illness and premature death in this country is reinforced by the absence of will. The inertia of the habit with all of its well-known hazards keeps the cigarette selling in the millions while the users die away in the thousands. Similarly, consider the volume of food consumed in this country. Thirty percent of Americans are obese, and whether we like it or not, obesity is not a positive physical adjustment to life's pleasures and/or problems.

The problem before us is that if we are engaged in negative habits without caring about the consequences, then the future of the country may be more delicately balanced than previously thought. Why? When people are against themselves, and people make up the society, then the society is against itself. This is, I believe, an incontrovertible fact. Interestingly, David Viscott states in his book, Risking, "...people nurture bad habits simply because they do not like themselves." Is it possible that we, as individuals and as a nation, fail to embrace prevention because we do not understand it? I hope not. Forty plus million people in the United Sates suffer from heart disease. Dean Ornish, MD, points out in his excellent book, Dr. Dean Ornish’s Program for Reversing Heart Disease, that "Sixty million people have high blood pressure. Eighty million people have elevated cholesterol levels. Over 1.5 million Americans have heart attacks every year." We are faced with huge medical problems, and the research in new drugs and technologies is not the answer. They are grossly inadequate in dealing with the magnitude of the problem.

In fact, I am disheartened with the notion that we have come to rely on the medical community to keep us healthy. Medical doctors cannot keep us from smoking cigarettes or from eating a high-fat, high-cholesterol diet. The answer lies in what may also seem to be impossible to reverse, and that is our way of living. For example, we know that it is hard to change the risk factors associated with specific diseases. Even when blood pressure is elevated, we continue to smoke. When a part of the heart dies (heart attack), we continue to look the other way. The blockages in the coronary arteries can be corrected by surgery, so what is the big deal? This is true, but not for everyone. What if you are the person who doesn’t benefit from surgery or from the popular calcium channel blockers or nitrates? At that time, what are you going to think? Maybe, the answer lies in the belief that had you listened to your doctor’s advice to stop smoking, exercise, and eat right; maybe the impossible is possible. Just maybe, (there are no absolutes), suddenly you would wake tomorrow, next week, or next month and have a spectrum of choices beyond your dreams.