Getting truly happy and healthy needs more than the occasional salad or infrequent exercise. It needs consistency in a way that works effortlessly.
The idea of automatic health has been floating around in my mind for a while, so I thought I’d put fingers to keyboard.
Everything that works is based on systems. The Earth goes around the sun in a predictable way and you can look at everything from biochemistry to business to electronics to whatever, to see it’s all systems.
What we really want more than anything is to feel good and be happy. Nothing can make up for not feeling good. And the fact is, that what we’re doing as a whole doesn’t have that result. The system isn’t working.
Habit power gets it done easily
What habit power allows you to do is create a predictable system where feeling good and the best health is easy. Habit power simply takes what works to create the result of feeling good and systemizes it, so it just keeps on working for you — automatic health and happiness!
Your body is an incredibly complex biosystem that needs some pretty simple inputs to keep it working beautifully. All we need to do is figure out what the best inputs are and keep on doing them.
Habit is the power that effortlessly repeats — for good or bad. We’re creatures of habit anyway. So good habits mean we feel great automatically. And that adds up to a ton of good feelings and avoiding a ton of bad feelings that would happen without systemizing the inputs that your body, mind and soul need to thrive.
It’s simple stuff really — do this, this and this — and don’t do that, and pretty soon everything start running smoothly, effortlessly and naturally as it is supposed to. And consistency means you’ll get a synergistic effect of doing lots of good things together. A holistic lifestyle approach creates a greater positive health effect than just the sum of its parts, because everything affects everything else.
Automatic health — all the good stuff and none of the bad stuff, easily and effortlessly. Priceless!
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Michael Kinnaird is the author of Happy Guide, the result of a 20 year exploration into what works for health and happiness.
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Yes, I agree Cory… I think that sub-optimal health is at the root of most of our world’s troubles. When we feel good, we just do good naturally, wouldn’t you say?
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EPAs can me made from ALAs in the body. ALAs are abundant in many seeds.
As for b12, it appears that a very large number of Americans may be deficient, something like 40%, so deficiency is not only a Vegan issue.
Odds are it’s caused by the overly sterile environment that we live in and not the choice of diet. The producing bacteria is simply missing from nature in general.
I’m glad you seem very health conscious, and while we might disagree a bit on the optimal diet, it seems that if there were more folks focused on health like us, the world would certainly be a better place.
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Personally, I’m fine with supplementation if it becomes necessary. I’d first look for Vegan food options of course.
Any calorie and protein issues are simply from lack of eating the amounts and varieties of food needed. This lifestyle requires a lot of food mass as it is less calorie dense. That’s a big draw because I love to eat, and always refused to limit my intake when I was eating junk.
The questions about whether it is truly animal products causing the harm, or if they just exasperate it, are rather moot for me as that is only one of the reasons I refuse to eat animal products. Animal farming is inefficient, unethical and unsustainable.
There’s a lot of reasoning and science surrounding this issue, but at the heart of all this, basically, is that everyone should be eating much more fruit and other produce than they do now, at the very least.
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Yes indeed. On the whole, I see the up and coming generation eating rubbish food for the most part. I would also personally love to see strict animal welfare standards which would reduce consumption of animal foods too.
I hope it all works out for you Cory but I am with Nazariah on this issue… science continues to discover new nutrients… from phytochemicals to EFAs and since nutrition is a baby science, we cannot know that raw vegan is adequate. In fact, all evidence for the long term points to the opposite. In the article, it mentions EPA, a long chain fatty acid that is essential and that vegans miss out on. It also mentions raw vegan folk wanting to manufacture a supplement for EPA. Hmmmm… I heard Stephen Arlin now has a protein supplement on the market. What else is missing I wonder?
I predict that science will eventually grind out the simple truth… we should eat a natural human diet if we want the best health.
Re b12… why wait for a problem for the sake of a supplement? Raw vegans will sooner or later become deficient and risk irreversible nerve damage.
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Thanks for replying!
Certainly I agree that any way of eating can be unhealthy when not done properly.
For me, animal products were the first thing to drop, for not only personal health, but ethical and environmental reasons too.
As you may know, a diet heavy on animal products is responsible heart disease, stroke, diabetes, many cancers, skin problems, and infections. The list goes on and on. With more people dying from animal product related disease in the US than anything else, there’s a strong case to at least reduce those products heavily in our diets.
In my studies of Veganism I discovered the Raw movement. There are plenty of different ways to be raw apparently, with some even promoting raw animal products, or high fat diets like most on Raw seem to be. Avocados are pretty popular. But what I have found to be the simplest and most healthful way to be Raw is the Low Fat Raw Vegan diet proposed by Dr Doug Graham in his 80/10/10 book.
Essentially LFRV is focused on obtaining most calories from fruit. You can’t find a food with better vitamin bioavailability, and a good amount of greens provide tons of minerals as well. If you eat enough calories you will get enough protein. And this is a high-calorie diet. You are encouraged to fill up to satisfaction on fruit many times a day.
But yes, Raw can be dangerous, if you get most calories from fat, or don’t eat enough, or get fruit heavily sprayed with pesticides.
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Hiya Cory,
LFRV is a wonderful cleansing diet and certainly leads to feeling amazing and clear minded. It’s easy to see how folks feel they have found dietary nirvana. And yet, as I say, problems appear long-term. One of these is certainly lack of calories, another is certainly b12, which Doug Graham himself has suffered from as well as many other raw food movement leaders. And yet they still insist that no supplementation is needed. This seems puritanican and blinkered to me.
There are many respected people, people with integrity who have done raw vegan with enthusiam and passion and still ended up with health problems.
Calories and b12 are two obvious ones but when you look deeply into human nutrition, there are other issues that come up… such as taurine, creatine, tribal diets etc that leave big question marks. The website beyondveg looks in-depth at all these issues although I wouldn’t recommend it for the average person as it is very high-brow, scientific and end up leaving one with more questions than answers.
So I personally would not recommend a raw vegan diet for the long term. Great for healing/detox though.
The BIG QUESTION is “What is natural?” That’s the only question we need to address surely.
Raw vegan dogma suggests we mirror the diet of other primates which is certainly enlightening. But bonobos eat animal foods, around 5% so it kind of urks when bonobo’s diets are used to justisty something they aren’t.
Also… and here’s a biggie… humans have spread over the globe and been forced to eat all manner of diets. Now natural selection is RAPID when enviromental pressure is also massive. It can wipe out 90% out a population leaving 10% adapted genes alive. SOOOOO if we want to advise a diet that will work for everyone, we have to go back a way… beyond grain and dairy to what we know all humans can thrive on… fruits, veg, nuts, seeds, animal source foods.
The raw vegan philosophy is beautiful and eating that way is wonderful. And we can get close. But I say that we do not yet know enough about the role of animal foods in optimal health to recommend raw vegan.
Pottenger’s cats, that raw folks love to talk about speaks more to me about the fact that we must look across several generations to see if a certain diet is optimal.
I’m happy you’ve found LFRV Cory, but I would urge an open, non dogmatic and puritanical mind should you begin to experience anything other than the best of health. Please take a b12 supplement at the very least :-)
All the best,
Mike
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Oh and I also wanted to say… that animal foods are correlated with those diseases, cause is not proved. The China study for example studied the link between cancer rates and animal foods. But the Chinese dietary staple is grain which is acid-forming. So any addition of meat is going to show an increase in disease. This doesn’t prove anything. “What is natural?”… we would do well to stay with the question because the number of interracting factors is immense, and when we study the trees and not the forest, the big picture eludes us. Mike
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Cory… this is an interview by Frederic Patenaude with Nazariah of the Essene Church. A highly recommended read…
http://naturalhygienesociety.org/diet-nazariah.html
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Here’s a bit of insight into my system:
Fruit and greens, natural living, cycling, being outside, reading and learning constantly about my passions, putting those passions into practice, reducing my lifestyle to only my essentials, “working” less, helping others, and spending time with those that support my ideals or that can respectfully disagree and intelligently share their own.
I’ve never been healthier than when I stay on this path, both mentally and physically, and those around me become healthier too.
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I like your system Cory… I’d like to intelligently (hopefully :-) share that the long-term effects of raw diets are potentially dangerous. Many folks have run into serious health problems long-term.
Mike
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