Reading through my blogs can be a frustrating experience. Often times people are looking for information like a needlepoint sampler; quick aphorisms they can read, understand and use with a sense of value. My writing is not often like that. I tend to get into the thickets; off on seemingly abstruse topics that are then bent to the need to make a health point.
Well, if that is the charge I imagine it is an accurate one. What use my writing has is not of the ‘cash and carry’ kind. I’ve worked with people, sick enough people, over enough years to know that the quick and thrifty appearance of learning, of teaching, will not sustain change, meaningful change over a long enough time and to the degree necessary to save and change a life.
We don’t wake up sick with diabetes or heart disease or even premature aging from years of simply misunderstanding some jingoistic slogan. We arrive at such a point by long habit built of poorly remembered, if remembered at all, tweaks and nudges of information, misinformation, family dynamics, self inflicted wounds of pride, discouragement and sometimes vain and groundless hope. Good stuff, too; I don’t want to minimize that part. This latter is not what gets us sicker and older than we need to be however.
And the sad fact is you cannot unpack such a past and path with a few pithy lines and a few good catch phrases. Even good ones like ‘paleo diet’ or ‘intense interval training’ or ‘sleep is more important than sex’ or whatever. But there is a way back; a sure way that will allow the unfolding of self-discovery, the emergency of self-mastery over time, it does require time, that can be guided by an error free methodology.
Folks here is the claim: I have invented such an error free methodology. Wow. Now if that is not hubris on steroids what is?
Here is how it works
- Step one: measure everything with a known and significant statistical value at predicting disease and aging
- Step two: change something, any something, eat differently, better, worse, who knows
- Step three: remeasure to see what effect the change has had on the variables you are tracking
- Step four: change something else, more and more intense of the same thing or something altogether different
- Step five: remeasure to see what effect the change….
Are you seeing a pattern here? Now the kinds of things you change are drawn from three simple categories:
- Eating behavior; content, type and timing
- Exercise and activity behavior; content, type and timing
- Spiritual discipline; this includes sleep, time laughing, quiet time, prayer, meditation, Qigong and so on
Now doing this as outline is where to start; the next step is seeing the results, believing the data and acting on that data. To this end my partner and I have developed a software graphing tool so that you can actively, dynamically see how the triglycerides change with the insulin level or the AM cortisol levels change with the testosterone levels or the LDL particle sizes change with the triglycerides. All of these associations are known. What is not known and cannot be known is how YOUR numbers move together or apart.
I’ve seen guys where one glass of wine a day messes up everything and others where no amount of wine has any measurable impact. Which are you? And, no, this is not a drunk test.
This is labor intensive, but staring into the graphs and acting on their lead is like looking into the eternal beyond; you can actually see your soul. You see what you are doing and its effects. In ways beyond self-deception you see how serious you are about getting healthier, younger, even looking better.
This truth does not evaporate the way repeating a new mantra can and often does; the sound does not rise to heaven there to disappear. The picture the graphs paint stares right back at you. Don’t let that picture be like the Portrait of Dorian Gray.
Smile, Have Fun, God Speed,
Dr. Mike
