Love, Family and Your Health

Hi everyone, I apologize for the little break I took from posting anything the last couple of months.  Nate’s Raw Harvest and school took a toll on my schedule and focus, but I am back and ready to share what I can.

Today, I’d like to switch gears away from nutrition and exercise in their role to promoting good health and talk about something we often don’t think about and perhaps even take for granted.  I’m talking about love and our families.  As humans, we often focus on the fact that we are physical beings and achieving our goals though physical means.  If we are unhealthy or sick we focus on medicine, surgeries, food, exercise, and rest.  We forget that we are much more than that.  We forget that we are spiritual beings as well.  We are emotional beings.  We are psychological beings.  We are always all of these things all of the time and everything we choose to do, say, or think affects all of these parts.  We forget that our health is determined by so much more than what we physically expose or deny ourselves to.

Over the past ten years that I have helped people achieve their health and fitness goals I have seen profound transformations and profound failures in many of my clients.  This gave me the opportunity to observe the differences between my clients and make correlations about why they succeeded or why the didn’t.  The most significant observation I made was that those who succeeded had very specific factors in common.  They all were happy with themselves and their lives, they all seemed to control their stress very well, and they all had loving relationships.  My own personal experience  has told me that one begets the other and that is very important to remember.  If you are happy with yourself and your life you will subsequently manage your stress better and also experience more fulfilling relationships.  If you manage your stress well you will be a happier person and able to have deeper, loving relationships.  If you have a loving relationship and family you will have a happier life and manage your stress more effectively.  From all of these you will have better health!

For this article I want to focus on love and family.  It really is vital for our happiness and health.  It can literally save your life one day.  Case in point is my own father.  Back when I was a teenager my father had his first heart attack at the age of 42 and his first open-heart surgery.  He also has Type I diabetes, which put him at very high-risk since his arteries were much more narrower.  He not only survived the surgery, but recovered extremely fast.  The doctors told my mother that what happened was quite astonishing and the most likely reason he survived was because of his family and our love.  I know this isn’t something that can be proved with some scientific study, but that’s the point.  Not everything is physical science.  Some thing’s are more than that and outside our full understanding.

The point is that if you have wife, a husband, mother,   father, girlfriend, boyfriend, grandmother, uncle, or even your dog or cat, give them a big hug and a kiss and thank them for all the happiness they bring you because you are a healthier person because of them!  If your relationship doesn’t allow you to do that then get your relationship and love back on track.  Your health and happiness depends on it.  If you don’t have any of the above then do what you can to change that.  True love between two people and the love of your family is a rare gift that you only get once in this life.  Thank G-d for love and your family and enjoy good health.

Nathan W. Jackson