Regardless of your current health knowledge or lack thereof, you’re in command of your physical destiny. While you can certainly consult with experts, the only true health guru in your life is you. Your well-being is yours to manage. You can delegate control but never responsibility.
What passes for modern health cares is still fairly primitive, sloppy, and error-prone, especially when compared to other technical disciplines. If you go to a doctor to report a health problem, there’s a fair chance you’ll be misdiagnosed, and you may be treated based on that. Even if you get a correct diagnosis, your treatment is likely to be qualified with words like should, hopefully, and side effects. Ask your doctor why the problem occurred and how to prevent it from happening again, and you may hear: “We aren’t exactly sure.”
When it comes to the health of your own body, the only authority you can really trust is yourself, and even then you must still be careful to watch out for blocks like false beliefs and media conditioning. If I (Steve Pavlina) give you any particular advice in this area that doesn’t resonate with you, you should reject it and trust your own judgment instead. That last sentence becomes rather dizzying if you consider that the statement also applies to itself, but I think you get the point I’m trying to make. You’re the authority here, and you should only trust my advice to the degree that it’s congruent with your own common sense.
If you can’t blindly believe so-called experts, how can you possibly become a competent health authority? First, you can look closely at your own perceptions and predictions. Second, you can tune in and connect more deeply with the choices you’ve been making to see what your intuition has to say. And third, you can fill in the gaps with personal testing and experimentation. Sometimes when you aren’t sure if a choice is right for you, the only way to learn the truth is to dive in and test it for a while.
Personal experimentation is a powerful tool for self-discovery. Try different diets. Test a variety of exercise routines. Experiment with sleep patterns. Find out what works best for you via direct trial and error. There’s always a risk when conducting such exercises, but blindly following social norms is inherently risky anyway. Remember that you’re ultimately responsible for your own health decisions.
If you do conduct your own experiments, consider this additional advice. First, keep a training log to record your results, at least weekly if not daily. Your logs may prove extremely useful to you down the road, perhaps even years later, so be as honest as you can in your reporting. Second, consider sharing your records publicly, such as via a blog. This allows others to learn from your experiences as well. When I conducted my raw-food trial, I received a tremendous amount of encouragement, coaching, and practical advice from experienced raw foodists who could see exactly what I was eating day by day. This helped me stay on track and avoid some potential pitfalls during my trial. I really wish I’d kept daily logs of my earlier vegetarian and vegan 30-day trials, since I’d love to look back and see what I was eating then. Those notes would have been great resources to share publicly for the benefit of others, especially sine my results were so positive.
When you get overwhelmingly positive results from a temporary experiment, make it permanent and lock in your gains. Allow this new habit to raise your baseline. If you continue making such personal upgrades year after year, you’ll probably encounter some setbacks now and then; but in the long run, it’s reasonable to expect that your health will see substantial improvements. For me, the biggest benefits have been mental rather than physical. Largely because of the health changes I made during the previous 15 years, my thinking is crisper and sharper than it’s ever been, and I can concentrate very deeply while tuning out distractions. This benefits me personally as well as those I serve.
Your path to better health may follow a different route from mine, but the nice thing about universal principles is that they’re independent of individual circumstances. You can use the same process I did to become the authority of your own body, even if you ultimately decide to manage yours differently from how I manage mine.
* Source: Personal Development for Smart People by Steve Pavlina