Use Change To Design A Healthy Life

Tell me what a man eats and how he treats his body, and I will tell you how long that man will live! Diet, yes. Living habits, of course. Attitude about life, naturally. They all matter.

Your human body is a marvel of construction. It is strong, resilient, capable of withstanding amazing amounts of abuse—but not endless abuse.

Disease, decay and early death are not products of any single excess or failure. Rather, they are the end result of living contrary to the laws of life day after day. The disease of the forties or fifties results from the mistakes of the twenties and thirties.

No one can help a man who refuses to help himself. If your life is to be a long and happy one, you must want to live! There is a whole beautiful, lovable and loving world to go on living in.

Doubtless our most important discovery in the past one hundred years is the knowledge that man is a part, a glorious part of nature. Nature’s pattern, above all else, is motion, constant motion, a never ending cycle of change. Electricity, as we now understand it, is motion. The universe is motion. Man himself is motion. Understand this, for it is basic in understanding yourself and your life.

Though you may hear the same name and return to the same house both evenings, you are, on Tuesday, a different person from the one you were on Monday. Twenty-four hours have wrought change; subtle change, true, but change none-the-less. You are a day apart from the one you were.

That is why it is so important for you to understand. Each day brings changes, both mental and physical. Your body is constantly changing. Are you aware of it? If not, then learn now, for you are about to apply this knowledge and change your life—mind and body!

Look at your hand. Turn it in the air, examine it closely. Is it the same hand you had yesterday, a year ago, ten years ago? It is not! In twenty-four hours, since this time yesterday, a small area of your hand has been shed and new tissue has replaced it.

Overnight a bit of you has been reborn. This is constant, never-ending. New tissue replaces old. You scrape your arm and it bleeds. Within a matter of days, that scraped skin has been naturally removed and new skin has replaced it.

Every organ, every bone, every single cell of life you call your body is in the endless process of change. A single red blood corpuscle has a life span of two months. This means that, in a period of 60 days, every blood cell you had at the beginning has done its work and ceased to exist, while new cells have been born to replace them all. This is the hope, the root of re-birth.

Your body is essentially a different body from that which you possessed ten years ago. New organs, blood and skin have all been reborn in a period of seven years. Grasp this fact. Understand it and understand how it applies to your own life.

What can it mean to you? What can it mean to the dream of a long and creative life? It is strange how so many of us accept the law of constant motion in all things that concern us except that most important matter of all, our health and life.

The housewife who finds her home cluttered with the dirt and waste of living does not hesitate to clean it out regularly. But that same woman frequently loses this understanding when she concerns herself with her own health and life.

If she is overweight, she may accept this, using such foolish phrases as “it is natural for me” or “that is a family trait.” If she suffers from headaches or chronic indigestion, she reminds herself that her mother or father suffered similarly and therefore it cannot be prevented.

She fails to apply the same logic to her body as she does to her home. She has forgotten that life and health, like all things which confront us, are of our own making,

Equally foolish is the man who, a year after his near-fatal heart attack, is back to his old habits. “Life is no fun eating the foods the doctor ordered and giving up nights in front of the TV with my favorite snacks Besides, doctors can perform miracles these days.”

What men have done, men can undo. This is the past history of man, and the promise of a bright future. Man is the living symbol of progress. He changes. He adapts himself to natural changes around him. He learns and applies his learning to making a better life for himself.

We have done this everywhere except for health and life itself! The longer we refuse to devote ourselves to an understanding of what makes for health, the greater the problem will become.

This is not just idle chatter. This is the substance of all that we have ever learned about health and rational living. If you cannot say, with certainty, that you want: to live—that you love life—then you are not prepared to build the kind of body and mind that will extend your life and end pain and disease.

If you know within yourself that life is precious, life is good, then more abundant health and happiness are yours for the building. If this is not so, then you have a job to do on yourself. Begin by accepting the fact that you, and only you, are responsible for creating your own life.