Simultaneous Paths to Health

Because living systems are incredibly nonlinear, health is most easily attained by working on several fronts simultaneously.  The mind and body must both be addressed because they are not separate entities.  The mind itself can be broken down into two parts:  relaxed and focused.  The body is built through two mechanisms:  exercise and diet. Diet provides the necessary materials for body construction while exercise provides a vector along which body modification will be optimized.  The importance of each component is inversely proportional to the attention given it by modern medicine.  The mind is more important than the body; diet is more important than exercise; the relaxed part of the mind is more important than the focused.  Regardless of their relative importance, all facets must be addressed and improvements to one area will benefit every other area.

The mind and body interact continuously and are not even separate entities.  In general the mind instructs the body and limiting beliefs turn into physical constraints on the body’s performance.  Under hypnosis people can lift heavier weights than they are otherwise able to.  They can also be made unable to lift even light weights.  Top athletes spend a tremendous amount of time preparing mentally for competitions.  When I ran track and cross country, I found that visualizing a race was the most important part of preparation.  Without prior visualization my body had a difficult time reacting quickly and forcefully enough to unexpected events as the race unfolded.  Most good coaches say that sports—the most physical of all activities—are 90% mental.  Just because something occurs in the mind does not mean that it is easy (think about school).  Mentally preparing for an athletic competition is a time and energy consuming process.  In fact I only did a complete mental preparation for most important one or two races each season of track and cross country.

Diet and exercise are the two key components in body development.  Nutrition is the most important factor.  Most people over the course of history have lived healthy lives without engaging in any exercise outside of the requirements for daily activities.  People who exercise while eating unhealthy diets, smoking, or binge drinking may do well in the short term, but their habits will catch up with them over the long run.  People who eat nourishing diets can live long and healthy lives without exercise.  Heart attacks were rare early in the 20th century despite the movement of people into office jobs.  It was only when margarine and vegetable oils started replacing butter and animal fats that heart disease became a problem in America.  Dr. Weston Price’s main accomplishment was finding common dietary patterns running through a large number of indigenous cultures, but in general he did not comment about commonalities in physical labor.  Price commented that the Maori tribe developed “calisthenics and systematic physical exercises” so that “they maintained excellent figures into old age.”  Price mentions earlier scientists reporting that the Maori were “the most physically perfect race living on the face of the earth.”  Although exercise (especially strenuous exercise) is not required for a healthy life, one cannot achieve optimal health without it.  Exercise accelerates improvements to the body because of its detoxifying effect.  It also improves one’s mental outlook through the release of chemicals.  A healthy lifestyle can be lived with a good diet and without exercise; however, the reverse is not true.  An optimal live cannot be lived without both.

Both the relaxed and focused minds are critical for problem solving and mental health.  The ability to focus is developed during conventional schooling.  It involves concentrating all of one’s mental abilities onto a problem.  This is often necessary but very tiring.  The second component of the mind is relaxation which is related to meditation and the subconscious.  It is not purposefully developed in modern western education.  When you sleep your subconscious mind reviews and learns from the activities and events experienced during the previous day as well as solving problems.  The subconscious plays a key role in the development of a belief system.  This is known and taken advantage of by propagandists and advertisers to steer our actions as well as by self help gurus.  By repeating affirmations or listening to an advertisement repeatedly the mind is unconsciously brought into alignment with these views.  Many times your active mind wants to do something, but your subconscious mind is afraid, doesn’t want to, or believes it is impossible.  Affirmations are a good method for bringing the subconscious mind into alignment with your goals.  The relaxed mind is tied into different energy systems running between different poles in the body.  Acupuncture, EFT, and massage therapy work by inducing changes in these energy systems.  Even though the subconscious mind is more powerful than the conscious mind it can be shaped through focused effort.