Daily Health Path
If a broken lifestyle is at the root of our health problems, the question then becomes, what does one do to be healthy? Should you go to a doctor, hire a personal trainer, or buy a book on a health-related topic? This is the question upon which our guidance is based. Here is our approach:
Define Success
There is an old saying by Yogi Berra, “…if you don't know where you're going, you might not get there.“ It's a funny statement, because it doesn't really make sense. At the same time, it is profound. If you want to achieve a goal, you must understand the direction you should aim. Personal beliefs affect the strategy a person choses to use in pursuit of a goal. If you believe, for example, that dietary fat is bad for you, you may avoid products that are high in fat in your attempt to be healthy. By the way, we do not feel all fats are unhealthy and we discuss this more in our EAT chapter.
Food, movement, and sleep are three fundamental pillars of health. We help you live as an:
- Intelligent Eater: Choose foods that will cultivate a long life of health by eating a non-toxic, ancestral diet. Be a good food citizen: Commit to humane treatment of animals, fair treatment of workers, and responsible treatment of the environment. Respect the cycle of food generation, preparation, and waste reduction. Appreciate every meal.
- Enduring Mover: Maintain your ability to meet physical challenges throughout life by sustaining a daily-to-weekly, mixed-intensity movement practice. Stand, Walk, Push.
- Restorative Sleeper: Good sleep starts with physical activity and light exposure during the day. Before bed, dim environmental lights and quiet the mind and body. Know the time you want to go to bed to get a full night’s rest. Make your sleep environment comfortable, cool, quiet, and dark.
Build the Road
Once we know the direction we shoud head, we can develop a roadmap for how to get there. Creating strategies to get from Point A to Point B is challenging. To make it a bit simpler, our approach is to evaluate our past, present, and future:
- Past: What were the conditions that preceeded our current world and how can we use that wisdom to help establish a proper health direction today?
- Present: What does current science tell us from the fields of: nutrition, activity physiology, sleep biology, genetics, genomics, epigenetics, neuroecomonics, and many others?
- Future: To arrive at a goal in the future, one must conceptualize the goal, generate a plan, follow the plan, resist competing influeces that get us off track, and finally, re-evaluate the plan as new information becomes available. The science of decision making is a very rich area of investigation and includes understanding how moment-to-moment decisions are made and knowing the influences that interfer or promote our ability to reach a remote goal (discussed further in the next page entitled 'Getting to where you want to go').
We apply this formula to each chapter and provide turn-by-turn directions on how you can live a healthy life, day by day.
Walk the Path
Now that we know where we want to go and have a rational approach to get there (ancestral template for health + current science + persuasive technology), how do we know if we are doing what we need to in order to be health? Our Walk-the-Path paradigm is designed to let you know if you're living the lifestyle today that will help you be healthy throughout life. Our self-tracking tools help establish a zone of health and let you know on a day-to-day, week-to-week, and month-to-month basis if you are in or out of that zone.
