Feeling good is an important benefit to taking good care of yourself. But if you neglect to prioritize your health because you feel fine, you may be at risk or miss out on feeling even better than you currently imagine!

     Hi there, it’s Elaine Gardner, the founder of DesignYourHealthyLife.com. While I want to feel good every day as much as possible and I want that for you too, if you only use the way you feel as your inspiration or drive to work on your personal health, you could be putting yourself at serious risk.

     So if you’re not doing everything you can to take care of yourself because you feel fine, that’s when you might get into trouble. You see, some of the biggest risks that we have with some of the biggest diseases that we have (the biggest killers) is that they are silent. They can come on over years without symptoms and without warning, completely sneak up on you and then rob you of your vitality or even your life. And those things include cancer and heart disease and I’m sure many others as well. Diabetes Type 2 comes to mind as well, even though that’s not necessarily a killer, it can create significant symptoms for you. And I personally know two people who have developed breast cancer over the years that felt fine and were completely blindsided by their diagnoses because again, they felt fine so they had no idea that something so risky and potentially harmful and devastating was brewing in their body.

     So that is one of the reasons why I believe, and I would encourage you to believe that you should be prioritizing your health and taking care of yourself no matter how good you feel, because even if you feel fine you could have serious things going on in your body. And the second reason is because you may not have anything else to compare to, so today you feel fine so you don’t particularly feel like you need to do anything specific or orchestrated in order to take care of your personal health, but there is a potential that you could feel so much better than you actually do; the potential to be happier, healthier, stronger, more vital, more creative, and that unless you actually make the effort to improve your personal health, you’ll never know what you could be potentially missing out on.

     I think my own personal healing story illustrates this very well. You may be very well aware that I spent more than two decades of my life facing significant health challenges and feeling pretty terrible most days. And as I committed to getting better and started to improve, the things that shifted for me were just so amazing. I had severe seasonal allergies that shifted, my gastrointestinal or intestinal distress started to shift, I had such poor quality sleep and that started to improve, my energy levels went up, my cognitive function improved, and I got my brain back! It was so freeing to get rid of the brain fog, and on and on and on and as I continued to invest in myself and take really good care of myself, the experience just kept getting better and better, so I kept feeling better and better.

     If I had stopped at just getting rid of the allergies or just getting rid of the GI distress, I would never have known how far I could actually go and how much better I could actually feel! And I can honestly say at 50 years old, I am the happiest, healthiest version of myself I have ever been. And I continue to improve even though I’ve been focused on my health and invested in my own healing journey for 16 years. So it has been such a worthwhile journey for me and I continue to amaze myself at the things that I can accomplish as my health gets better and better.

     Just a recent example, we were on vacation a few weeks ago and took a rather adventurous bike ride, and not only did I do much better on this unpaved bike path than I could have ever done in the past, (I’m sure I would not have been able to do it – even just to have the physical stamina to actually do this almost two mile unpaved bike path), but to recover from it much more quickly as well. Actually, the soreness that I felt afterward was actually quite comical because it was my upper back and my neck that were the most intense, not my lower body, not my legs. I think I was just so focused on the trail because there were lots of roots and rocks and there were places where you could actually fall off the pathway into little ditches and things like that, that I was gripping my handlebars and staying so focused much more intently than I realized, so I did have some soreness in that area, but I did recover very quickly.

     And the adventure of the bike ride was really worth it because it led to a part of the ocean we had never been to before, so we got to explore. So I get to experience these great things that I really physically would not have been able to do before, and if I had attempted, I would have been absolutely miserable for days and days and days.

     So I encourage you to think about not just settling for fine, but for reaching for more, to see actually how far you can take it, how good you can feel, how much you can improve your energy, how much you could expand your cognitive function and your creativity, how you can improve your strength training. And not to overdo it in any of these areas as health is always a holistic approach and it needs to be in balance. So physical health, mental health… it all goes together and sometimes people focus too much on one area and not enough on the other, so I wouldn’t encourage you to do that. But you never know until you try, how far you can actually go, how much you can improve your health and how much it can change your life.

     I think it’s rather tragic that many of the things we focus on and spend lots of money and time and resources on, (and not that they’re not important, like education and careers), none of that will mean anything if we lose our health and the ability to enjoy our lives and also put yourself at risk for an early death. So I would encourage you to really consider how far you can take your own personal health, and I encourage you to go down that pathway and see what you can actually achieve.

     So I hope you found that inspirational. I’d love to hear your comments in the section below and I look forward to speaking with you again soon.