Optimizing Your Health Post 2
When we discuss human design, it is necessary that we get into topics such as genetics as well as our ancestral development. It’s necessary that we consider concepts such as how complex systems change, adapt, and evolve over time. It’s necessary for us to consider fields of study such as biological evolution.
I want to stop for a moment and offer all who read this some perspective about me. When we get into these topics, it can always be polarizing to one group or another. Concepts like biological evolution can immediately provoke strong feelings depending on one’s belief system. I’m asking all readers to try and temper any feelings this provokes and just examine the information I’m presenting. I am not a physicist, a geologist, an anthropologist, or an archeologist. I have no advanced training in how to understand how long this world or this universe has been here. Those are not my fields of expertise, and I’m making no absolute claims about these facts.
I’m simply discussing how complex systems—such as the human system of physiology—change, adapt, and evolve over time. This is very important because to understand how we can be optimized; we must understand where we came from. We must understand the influencers that shaped human beings into existence.
I myself am a spiritual person. I do absolutely have a theological construct that undergirds my view of life. I see strong evidence of wise, creative design as I observe the world around me and especially the human beings I interact with. I do not get into the details of my specific faith, my politics, or other such topics because I never want to detract from the truths about health I’m trying to share.
My own faith system impresses upon me the values and priorities of love, mercy, grace, forgiveness of self and others, non-judgment, and service to all people. It also informs me that every individual human being is uniquely designed to serve a dignified purpose in this world and that every human life has value.
That’s why I spend so much time trying to teach these truths of health. Because good health is foundational to realizing a human’s potential in life.
>
“You will always have greater potential if you optimize your health.”
It does not matter the context of health. It does not matter what’s happened in the past or what accidents, trauma, or other things beyond our control could have influenced our health. I’m talking about health optimization within whatever context you find yourself. You will always have greater potential if you optimize your health.
My passion is to study human health, apply it with individuals, and then teach it as much as possible to everyone who could benefit from these truths. I am focusing on the big picture concepts. These are understandable and they make sense. They are also applicable to anyone.
I’m here to teach the truth of human design, and how we can optimize our health by honoring that design. If you apply my teachings and you clearly experience an improvement in subjective and objective well-being, and your health is clearly improved, then you know this is true for you. It is important that everyone individualize these teachings. We have differences from one another that do impact how we become our healthiest selves.
Approximately 99.7% of the human genome is the same for all of us. That means the overall operating system is similar for virtually every human being. But the 0.3% of our genome that differentiates us from one another is enormously important. These areas of genetic variation inform us about our best possible approach to nutrition, our circadian rhythm function, our cognitive health, our stress responses, our detoxification pathways, our nutrient needs, and many other important foundational attributes of health.
We are entering a time where we can understand how our genetics differentiate us from others, and how we can optimize our health. I will discuss more of this as we work through this blog series.
In some ways, I feel as though this might be the most important blog series I write. It will sum up so much of what I teach. Hopefully it’ll awaken anyone who comes across it to the truth of health and the pathways of optimization that unlock our ability to live up to our highest potential. Poor health steals from us; it takes our energy, impacts our mood, impacts our thinking ability, costs money, creates poverty, and has many other negative consequences. We do not have to live with poor health. We do have a say in it. But we must know the truth if we’re to do anything about it.
Again, this truth is based on strong evidence supported by scientific literature, as well as extensive experience working with patients and observing how health can be optimized over time.
>
“Our health is intrinsically tied to our environment.”
Think about the potential of a human being. A human being is the only complex organism on Earth that can train its mammalian dive reflex to dive 100 feet into the sea, spend several minutes there, observe, study, and contemplate what it sees, return to the surface to write about it and describe it to others, and then walk up a 20,000 foot mountain, observe what it finds up there, return, and then also write about that.
Our cognitive potentials are amazing. Think of all the bridges we’ve built, the challenges we have overcome, the potential for good we have, but also the potential for bad. Nevertheless, there is no denying that we have an enormous potential within us.
That potential resides within every one of us. Yes, it does vary. We have areas of greater strength and areas of relative weakness, but overall, this potential is in every one of us. We should hope to at least realize a little bit of it. It doesn’t mean you’re going to climb above 20,000 feet or spend 5 minutes under water; you just need to know that the potential to do so is inside of you. You should have a strong desire to experience what unlocking that potential can do for you.
My belief is that, when we unlock our potential, we should be using it to serve one another and to care for this planet we live on. Ultimately, our health is intrinsically tied to our environment. There’s no way to experience our best health unless our environment has been properly stewarded and cared for. Our air should be clean. Our water should be life-giving. Our food should be nutritious. Our soil should be healthy. The animals that we share the planet with should be properly cared for.
Human health will always be holistic. We are absolutely interdependent with our environments and every other individual creature we share this planet with. We must care about all of it.
If you worked in my profession, you would know that these goals are not being realized. You would see how we are losing our potential, how we are losing our health, and how it’s affecting our children. You would see how we’ve set the bar far too low. We’ve settled for much lesser versions of ourselves.
It’s time we raise that bar, and that we do it together by pursuing the path of optimized health for the purposes of living out our highest potential.
What is your favorite health habit? What are you proud of? Share it with me on Facebook!
