Healthy Living - What's Smart, What's Idiotic?

A recent visit of a friend from Chicago sparked a lot of discussions about healthy living. She related how a few years back she embarked on a one month "raw food diet" that cleansed her body. She lost 20 lbs. and felt remarkable afterwards, bounding with energy.

Another friend will soon be publishing a book about fighting cancer without drugs. Given the numerous studies reporting that patients receiving placebo medication often do as well, if not better, than those receiving pharmaceuticals, I have no doubt that the human mind has the power to fight most any ailment. In order for that to happen though, one must be eating and exercising well.

IMHO the reason pharmaceutical drugs are such a big success is because of the "light switch" mentality our modern society has made most of us take for granted. Put another way, most of us are lazy. Collectively, as a society, we want to be able to live our lives anyway we want, eating, drinking, & smoking as much and as frequently as we want. Then, when we get sick, we want to be able to flip a switch aka popping a pill and have it cure everything.

I sense a growing awareness amongst some - not most, but some - that something's wrong with this picture. If you own a car, might it not make more sense to maintain it on a regular basis, rather than just have a tune-up and car wash every 10 years? The same holds true for the human body. If you treat it well, you're more likely to get better performance out of it all the time, rather than just once in a while.

I, for one, have a fairly healthy lifestyle. I walk a lot, bicycle some, and play volleyball twice a week. I cook for myself, don't eat out too much, and do concern myself with what I eat. But the past few months I've noticed a definite sluggishness in my body & my mind. Though I'm not prepared to do a radical all raw food diet, I am going to make a point of eating healthier and exercising a whole lot more.

Which brings me to the "idiotic" part of healthy living. I do wonder if some take it too far? A case in point is a sad story I just heard about a member of a travel site I belong to. A woman on there was very much into doing everything naturally. She recently embarked on a trip to Africa. Though there were extensive warnings about malaria, she refused to take any medication for it. Sure enough, she got malaria and died. True story.