5 ways to take control of your health

No matter your age, your gender, or your current physical condition – when it comes to your body, you’ve got to be the boss! It’s important that you take charge of your health (and keep it) at every stage of your life.

There are lots of ways that you lose control of your physical, mental, and emotional well-being. It may happen so gradually that you don’t realize the slope you’ve slid down until things have progressed past a point of decent quality of life.

Who’s in Charge of Your Health?

Sometimes, it’s a well-meaning friend or co-worker who “knows what’s best” for you. For others, it could be a family member or significant other who offers life, fitness, or personal advice you neither need nor want.

Young people are at the mercy (and knowledge – even if it’s limited or outright wrong) of their parents, guardians, or officials who dictate every aspect of their lives. The elderly are too often treated as if they’re still children as well.

Then, there’s your personal physician or others in the medical field. If you have a weight problem, heart disease, or diabetes, they may suggest diet or lifestyle changes that you can’t or won’t follow, give you information that’s outdated, or even brush off your valid questions about holistic rather than pharmaceutical options.

If you want to take charge of your health, you need the best information that applies to you and your life. Not the “standard issue” advice handed out over the last few decades that has landed the population in one public health crisis after another.

The government, medical community, pharmaceutical companies, and food industry stood by as the control over your body was hijacked. These groups made terrible choices – based on flawed evidence – that has directly led to the explosions of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, autoimmune disease, dementia, and so much more.

Now more than ever, it is critical that you do your own research and question everything! If you don’t get the information yourself, it’s unlikely you’re going to hear it.

You simply cannot take the word of industries who foolishly advised that the entire country remove the fat from your diet to “prevent heart disease” when every cell in your body needs it.

They made all fats out to be the bad guy (along with cholesterol) and worked to strip it completely from our food supply. Then they conveniently replaced it with more sugar, GMO foods, and chemical additives.

The combination has proven profitable for all of them but deadly for humanity.

The profit margins for those in the medical profession, made by pharmaceutical companies, and dropped in the lap of the food industry are pretty shocking.

All of us – the average people – have never been sicker in the history of mankind.

Regional advisor for the World Health Organization (WHO), Dr. Enrique Jacoby, thinks the problem lies heavily on the American way of life. “We’re sicker for a number of reasons. Not one single factor is to be blamed for the problem. One of the reasons is we are eating badly. We are being excessively exposed to junk food. We have more pollution because of biofuels that are really, really bad for you.”

This is part of living longer but not living better. More and more of the aged among us live their last decades in extremely poor health.

Mainstream medicine, organizations, food manufacturers, and drug companies have been calling the shots for decades now – dictating everything from environmental policies to agriculture to your tap water – and we are far sicker for it!

They’ve been in control long enough…and caused enough harm…now, it’s your turn.

5 Tips to Take Charge of Your Health Today

Make sure your doctor is paying attention. Prescribing a pill for whatever symptom you experience is not helpful. A doctor uninterested in “why” you’re sick – the cause of your symptoms – is not someone you want to take charge of your health outcomes. They might not even know, honestly.

Doctors (particularly in the United States) see so many patients daily and spend almost no time with them. If you feel like you’re on a patient conveyor belt…it might be time to find another health practitioner. It isn’t even always the physician’s fault.

A recent study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that most American doctors are forced to spend more than two-thirds of their time on paperwork.

Understand how your own body works. You don’t need to be a doctor to obtain basic knowledge of how your body functions. A lot of the advice dispensed through health organizations and your local doctor’s office doesn’t even make sense.

Take the “cholesterol is bad” argument. Without it, humans would die. The narrative of dangerous cholesterol coincides with the explosion of statin drugs on the market. Coincidence? Probably not. In order to question what you’re being taught and/or told by your doctor, you need good information.

Do the research yourself. There have been incredible breakthroughs in human health in the past two decades. Unfortunately, most of that new information hasn’t made it into conventional medical training yet.

That means men and women training to become doctors may not even know about alternative (proven effective) treatments for common and uncommon conditions and diseases. If you don’t know what questions to ask, if your doctor doesn’t know what to tell you, then you could accidentally ignore the valuable information you need to take charge of your health and get better.

Be committed to lifestyle changes for better health. If you’re not willing to make serious, permanent changes to your own daily life and routines, nothing else is going to help. There is no pill or graphic that’s going to replace good nutrition (without the constant inclusion of junk), adequate sleep, not smoking, limiting alcohol, daily exercise (even low-impact), and gaining the upper hand when it comes to stress.

In our modern world, it’s easy to put off exercising to watch television or get your food through a window instead of cooking it. There’s no doubt that those “easy” habits come at a high cost. They will chip away at your cellular health until your body simply can’t take anymore.

Own how you feel and how you want to feel. The scientific community is only recently realizing that holistic medicine has been correct all along about the influence of the mind on physical health. Know your body, listen to it, and chart your health struggles.

If you feel chronic pain but your doctor can’t find a “cause” and therefore doesn’t think it’s real, you need to take charge of your health immediately. You want to feel better, you want to have a good quality of life. It’s up to you so don’t stop working toward that goal.

There are real, effective steps you can start taking today (right now) to work toward the long-term health you need. It won’t always be easy (change rarely is), but isn’t your quality of life now and knowing you can keep it into oldest age worth the work?