How do you define health?

The episode dwells into the definition of health, moving beyond conventional ideas related to nutrition, diet, and exercise. It poses several questions for listeners to ponder, challenging the common perception of health as being linked solely with physical aspects. I recount the inspiring story of an overweight woman who defies conventional fitness norms, reiterating the fact that health is unique and multifaceted for every individual. An emphasis is laid on the integration of mental and spiritual aspects while striving for better health. I conclude by defining health as the absence of sickness, pain, and suffering, promote positivity and joy, and encourages listeners to share their definitions of health.

00:08 Introduction and Welcome

00:20 Defining Health

00:50 Challenging Traditional Health Metrics

01:30 Exploring Different Health Perspectives

02:40 The Illusion of Health

03:15 The Reality of Disease and Symptoms

05:28 The Misconception of Modern Health

07:44 The Importance of Alternative Health Approaches

11:44 The Story of an Unconventional Health Journey

16:22 Understanding the Two Phases of Health

18:21 The Role of Spirituality in Health

18:45 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Welcome friends. My voice is a little bit better today. So I think we're going to have a short one still. Bear with me next week. We'll have a full blown episode like normal.

I have a question for you.

What is health? How do you define health? Morpheus said. 📍

Eric says.

If you're talking about illness, you don't feel. What's your blood tests reveal, eating the food pyramid. And how many pushups you can do. Then health. Is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you have been sold.

I know that wasn't really awesome, but I tried right. Health is more than just supplements in dieting. It's your attitude and your fortitude in your focus and your desire to feel good most of your life. I am trying to help you see. That there are things beyond just nutrition and diet. There's individual areas, your body. As much as your whole body that are involved in your health.

His health looking good. Or feeling good. Is it. Low body weight. Is it energy levels? Is it low stress? Is it a lack of sickness or disease? How do you define health?

Those six questions are actually pretty important. If you think. Health is looking good. Well, There's lots of people that look good, who aren't healthy. A lot of people that feel good. Right now. But won't later.

Is it bodyweight? That if your body weights low, you must be healthy. I've talked about this many times. Your body weight means nothing. For your health. How about your energy levels?

You could be substituting caffeine and not even know what your base level of energy really is. So how healthy are you? Is it low stress? Yeah, low stress, I think is an actual real one. If you can handle stress. Or you don't have enough stress in your life because you're not doing anything. so is it then a lack of sickness or disease? Yeah. That's exactly what it is. It's a lack of sickness. The lack of disease. Right.

That's how I define health. How many people do you know that have actually been healed? I mean, let's really think about it. Do you know anyone. That's ever been healed of something legitimate in your whole life. You can probably name maybe one or a couple. You're not going to have. A lot of stories. Now I'm not talking about, will somebody cut themselves and they healed from that.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about something that is really serious. Any of the major diseases.

How many people do you know who think.

Just because there's no symptoms, I must be healthy.

You can be unhealthy and not have symptoms yet. The symptoms eventually will show up. Everybody knows this. But we forget about that and we say, I'm doing fine right now. Guess what? It's common. Don't you worry. It's coming, all these people that said, and I was one of them. I'm never going to get fat, never going to gain weight.

I'm never going to have this. I'm never going to have that. And your parents said, oh, just wait till you get to be my age. Well, I am their age now. And I've dealt with a lot of problems that I never thought I would deal with because when you're young, you think, oh, everything's just fine.

Even people who are older that are considered to be healthy, it's just a matter of time.

You're going to feel something. So the more you can do now to stop that for the future. Why not do that. Why not take those steps.

Is it really possible to heal is a great question. Yeah. It is possible to heal. Everything that you have in your body, you can heal. Unless you had some detrimental accident where you lost a limb or something horrifying like that. Of course, you're not going to get that back.

But anything else that you can regenerate in the body, you can heal.

Just takes either a small amount of effort, small changes over a long time. Or big changes over a long time, either way. That plan of action will get you there. Or how about it's just management.

The question, a lot of people ask is.

If it's really possible to heal or is it just management of symptoms? Well, yeah. Just because you're managing symptoms doesn't mean that you're healthy and it doesn't mean you've healed. You're just. Managing the symptoms.

My boat is sinking. I stick my finger in the hole. We're not sinking anymore. Have I fixed the problem? No,

maybe our understanding of how we heal is wrong. Because nobody seems to really be getting actually healed. All the sicknesses and diseases are on the rise. And are massively higher than they ever used to be. We're dealing with. Uh, disease now that they didn't even have names for just 50 years ago.

We're dealing with minor things that they never had a thousand years ago.

Of course we've helped to get rid of some of the things that were old school problems, because we have sanitation. Thank you very much.

But all in all, are we actually getting healthier? We're living longer. That's only because we have modern medicine to stop things like, well, you broke a bone, so you don't get an infection in the bone and die. We have things like this. We can extend people's lives. But aren't we actually healthier. No. We aren't.

I would make the statement.

We are not healthier than we used to be.

We've had so many advances in science and medicine. And yet. We're not healthier now. Then we were 200 years ago. Oh, but Eric people only lived to be like 35, 45, 60 years old. Yeah. Cause they died of things like they got ran over by a horse. Or they drank water, had Giardia in it.

Or they.

Fell off a cliff or there's any number of weird things that they died from, but they didn't die from heart disease and they didn't die from cancer. Diabetes.

Autism. Dementia. Alzheimer's.

Deaths from a hospital. Hmm. That's interesting. They died of weird stuff.

Maybe the body doesn't function the way that we think it's supposed to. So we think this is the way the body's supposed to function. Maybe it's actually functions differently. What we know is such a small amount anyway. What's the big picture. So if the small amount is all, we can figure this pathway out.

We figured this system out and in this cellular structure. And when you look at the grand scheme of things, We go. Yeah, that's only a little bit. So how does it all really work together?

I don't know. Nobody does. This is why we have science. Work as much as we can figure this stuff out. We just hope that the science is not biased. Which 90% of it is.

This is precisely why. We need to explore Alternative thoughts and alternative ideas. We have to do this in order to expose the theories. That have been practiced for so long. Why did ancient people. Do things a certain way. Why don't we do those things anymore. We've replaced those with newer, modern techniques and we are not healthier for it.

I mean, heck. They've had sewers and running water back in Rome. It's not a new invention.

Now we recycle our water. We reuse the sewage where they didn't. So there's that.

There are theories that have been proven to be real. Yet we try and heal the body based on these theories that don't actually. Work out, they don't pan out. They write papers about them, their opinion papers. They are not provable theories. Then the theories that we have proven nobody wants to use those because nobody makes any money off those.

You see.

Maybe we need to think outside the box a little bit. Maybe that box serves a purpose to make people rich. Maybe that box is just a money hole.

Now our bodies are more than just chemical machines.

Maybe there's many more factors as a whole that affects you. System's all working together. You have Microsystems working with macro systems. To make up the whole system, the little things work with the big things and the medium things.

So I say to you again, what is health?

I see it's strategy. You need to have a plan. The plan. Is the key to your future success? If you don't know where your want to be in your health, 10 years from now or 20 years from now. Or two years from now. How are you going to get there? You don't have an action plan. You want to save a million dollars?

Well, how are you going to do that? Just randomly throwing money in to a container someplace. It doesn't work that way.

It's concepts. Your concepts are your mental plan. That's how you use your strategy. Come up with concepts. The concepts are what you put into action.

So you have a strategy. Which then turns into concepts. This is the umbrella approach.

Now, what you can do is focus on the individual nutrients,

all your protein, all your fat, all your carbs.

All those macro nutrients. Then you can focus on individual chemicals, your vitamins, your minerals, all the tiny little molecules and structures that make up all our food. All these wonderful things you hear about all the. Antioxidant this and free, radical scavenging that, and all these things that they find resveratrol to. Vitamin. 9,557,652.

That. They didn't know existed until last night when somebody did a study somewhere in Japan.

Individual macro nutrients in their proper ratios. Meaning. We'll do you want to have a higher protein intake, a higher fat intake or higher carbohydrate intake, depending on what you're doing, how are you want to run that system? Do you want to. Be a marathon runner. Do you want to be a bodybuilder? Do you want to be a pro athlete?

Do you want to just be the best jump rope artists that's ever. Been a jump rope artist. Well, how are you gonna get there? You're going to use the macro nutrients and all the chemicals. As your food. Then. You also have to have mental, spiritual. Health. All three, have to come together to make your health, mental, spiritual, and physical. Makeup you, you can't have just one and all of a sudden you're the healthiest person ever.

So, let me give you a quick story.

Something that might.

I don't know, it might uplift some of you. I don't think I've ever told a story on the podcast yet.

But I met this woman once she was a chef. Very, very overweight. What I mean, overweight, I'm talking some serious weight. She wasn't tall. She was on the shorter side. She had a lot of that loose body fat, if you know what I mean?

She said she felt fine. She just. On her body was just big and she was nothing she could do. She tried diets and exercise and all kinds of things. She asked me, I'll do anything. So I said, all right, well, let's try this. So I put her on. My form of HIIT training that I used back then, which I still also tell people to do today.

And a. Very regimented diet for her situation, for what she's doing. Remember, she's a chef. So, you know, she's tasting food all the time is a different than URI, but. I put her on. A pretty serious program. She said she had plenty of energy to do it. So I was like, all right, let's do it. I don't have to start you slow.

She's like, don't start me slow. Let's go. . I put her on my HIIT program. I've never had anybody get past level one ever. There's three levels.

After a short duration of time. I want to say it was a few weeks. It wasn't that long. She came back in to see me.

And she said. Well, I haven't lost any weight. And is there anything more you can give me? And I said, What.

Are you serious? Nothing you have lost any weight at all? She said, Nope. I haven't lost any weight at all. And I skipped right past level one and two and went right to three. And it's not enough. Now. There are pro athletes that can't do level three. How did this young lady. She was only about 30. Have the ability to do. A level that even pro athletes have a hard time doing.

I don't know. I can tell you. I have no idea. So when you hear people say in the world, this is definitive fact on how the human body works. This definitive fact on what you need to do. This is the diet you have to do. This is what you have to do, and that's what you have to do wrong there. Different people out there that respond differently to different approaches.

You have to work people individually. It's a process. Figure it out with them. You got to try things. So. I said, well, what are you going to do? Cause I don't know what else to give you. There's you are literally doing the hardest program that you can do. There's nothing more. And she said, I don't know. I'll figure it out. Several months later. She came to see me. And I said, how are you? She's like great. I said, well, what's, what's going on?

She says, well, I joined a long distance bike club.

If you're not familiar with what these people do is a group of people will get together and bike quite a distance. You know, we're talking. 50 a hundred, a hundred fifty, two hundred, two hundred fifty miles over a weekend. So they'll run from one city to the next closest city to another city and back. These are long trips.

Now mind you.

When I saw her after a few months. She looked much different. She was pretty much the same size.

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I said, so how's it going? She said it's all right. I decided to just do it on my own now. And I said, why? She says, well, They kept wanting to stop. You see. Long distance. Bike clubs.

They'll ride for an hour, let's say, and then they need to pull over. Go to the bathroom, get some water, relax, stretch out. And she kept saying, why are we stopping? And so over and over and over again, all these trips. She's outworking everybody and they keep wanting to stop and take a rest and she doesn't want to rest because she doesn't need to. I mean like a superwoman. So she said, you know what? I was tired of stopping. I just do it on my own. So, what, what do you say about that?

What do you tell somebody that can do this? I'm sorry, you need to look like. A fitness model to be able to do what you're doing. No. This woman.

Well out exercise anybody, you know? And she's huge. Well, How go figure, I don't even know what to say. It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen in this field.

I love Tom and her story because. That is so inspiring. She went right past the, you know, what. I don't care about my weight anymore. I feel good. I didn't know I could do what I could do. This is amazing. I'm not getting any bigger. So it is what it is. She accepted herself and moved on. Is that healthy? I would say probably. She had no ill health. And she get out, run everybody.

So I don't know. What do you think?

There are two phases. Of health. So picture like this, you got one side and the other side. The one side is all these macro nutrients I'm talking about. They're responsible for half of you. Protein carbs fat. Or lack of carbohydrates and all the other macros.

The other side is the chemicals that make up the macros like sodium potassium and sulfur. Magnesium vitamins, all the micro nutrients like trace elements, your micro-biome amino acids, sugars, cholesterol. You have two sides of you. Think about that. When you're approaching your health and you're thinking about things that you consume, you want to think larger. That's your protein, carbs and fat.

Then you want to think smaller.

Those are all your chemicals. Including your microbiome.

Need to have those in check. Types of food. You're eating supplements. Whatever diet plan you want. Uh, I'm never going to tell anybody they shouldn't eat a certain way. Whatever you want to eat that you think is going to be healthy. When you do that diet plan, you'll know if you're making progress and if you're not making progress, it's time to change. And do something else. Change slowly.

There's no reason to go cold Turkey and change up programs all the time. That's not good for your microbiome. But how do you know what works best for you? If you don't try different things?

Then you have water and air oxygen, helium, hydrogen. Carbon dioxide and every other element on the chart that's implicated in your health, whether it's in your body or how it affects your body. Those things. You can work with, with things like breathing. Right. Getting rid of chemical toxins in your environment. Don't put that stuff on your body or bring it into your home.

If you don't need it. They're toxic learned to get rid of that stuff and bring the positive things in.

And of course someone might even say the spirit.

Can you actually have real health without the mental spiritual side? I don't think you can. Some say that side's more important than the. Physical side. What do you think? I think they're all part of God's plan. And to me. Start spiritually first. Then it goes mental and then it goes physical.

I hope this has inspired you.

To contemplate what health really is for you. How do you define health?

I define it as a lack of sickness. And pain. And suffering.

And disease.

And those are replaced with happiness and feeling good. and joy. Wanting to accomplish things. And be proactive and being positive. Trying to help other people. Doing things with your life to create health for other people and around you.

That's how I define health.

Email me. Comment in the sections down below. Let me know what you think health is. I would love to hear from you guys. And I know others would too. Thank you for listening. Next week's episode is going to be awesome. I promise. It's going to be really awesome.

Take care of yourselves.