Like many people, you probably believe that getting healthy is hard. This article is intended to challenge those beliefs, and will describe why your current beliefs about health may be the very thing holding you back from getting healthy. AND this article will explain why it is absolutely integral to your success that you MAKE being healthy easy.

To make this secret work for you, you have to know a little about learned (or habitual) behaviour and evolution. In the game of life, the goal is always survival. As living organisms, we instinctually (that is, without total awareness or thinking) seek out means of life support (offense maneuver) so that we can keep all our senses alert for danger (defense measure).

So, you see, nature has made it easy for us to behave without conscious thought . We are naturally attracted to substances and activities which promote survival and we react negatively to whatever threatens our survival.

How did nature provide us a way to sense the difference between the two? Our feelings! Our emotional barometers tell us through pleasure that we’ve encountered something which supports life and the alarm for danger comes in the form of negative feelings, thoughts or physical reactions. Instinct is what has preserved the human species.

But in a developed society, life becomes more complicated than simply surviving. While our modern lifestyles and man-made conveniences give us extreme pleasure, many of them are completely unnatural with various consequences to the natural order of life. They interfere with our total health, impeding our biological functioning in almost imperceptible ways. Over time, and along with natural aging, the damage accumulates. A nudge into a telephone pole with your car won’t leave much of a dent, but keep nudging a thousand times over in that general area and boy, what a hole!

So while our instincts were meant to help us develop habits that promote health, many us we have instead learned unconscious behaviour that affects the smooth operations of our biological machine and expedites the aging process . We have to break the habits that are harming us and replace them with habits that promote health. The following secret will allow you to use your natural instincts to help you not only survive longer, but enjoy every minute of it.

The Secret

Bottom line: The secret to making healthy living easy is to find the pleasure in healthy alternatives.

Health is easy when you make it easy. When I was having trouble maintaining healthy habits and choices, I thought the harder I tried and the more sacrifice I made, the better and faster my results would be. But when I tried too hard, I pushed past my limits and ended up making it into an unpleasant experience, which we now know activates our instincts and we react negatively to it. And what did I do? Forget health, even though I knew (logically) it was better for me, and continue my highly pleasurable but harmful habits.

But I didn’t give up my quest for health because I believed in the benefits of health . I’ve experienced it before - when I was younger! What I I did give up on was my approach to health. I abandoned trying so hard to be perfect at healthy living and just tried to live the most healthful way I could at the time. When I started enjoying my healthy choices, they naturally became habits. After awhile I started noticing, along with others, that my healthy choices turned into a healthy lifestyle!

The Critical Point Approach

I read a few books that helped me change my beliefs about health . One of which, Power vs. Force by Dr. David Hawkins, drove it home for me that by making getting healthy easy, I was actually being more effective:

“Critical point analysis is a technique derived from the fact that in highly complex systems there is a specific, critical point at which the smallest input will result in the greatest change. ”

Hawkins gives an example of this “natural law” with the fact that you can cripple a large locomotive by knowing the exact spot to apply pressure. But it rang a bell for me because this is essentially what I did to make getting healthy easy!

For instance, the human body can be thought of as a “highly complex system” and “Input” in this case would then mean whatever you need to run your biological machine. It could also mean that there’s an optimal amount of this input that “will result in the greatest change” towards a natural state of being, i.e. optimal functioning or total health .

The Implications and a New Paradigm for Health

If you apply this idea of a critical point to the body, then getting healthy requires practically no effort except for what the individual is capable of doing at any given time. In effect, you’re looking for the sweet spot in the level of effort you use to achieve health, as well as the quality and the amount of the food, water, sleep and exercise you need to optimally run your biological machine.

You’re looking for the critical point where it requires the least amount of input to result in the greatest change.

Finding the Elusive Sweet Spot

How will you know when you’ve reached the sweet spot so you can get maximum benefits from your healthy efforts? Your instinctual emotional barometer!

Your sweet spot is the point of your enjoyment within your healthy choice and your level of satisfaction afterwards. This means that no matter what you do to achieve health, as long as you make the most healthful and pleasing choice available to you at the time, then you’re being most efficient with your time.

You are actually getting the full benefits of your healthy choice!

This concept of a critical point is how I made getting healthy easy. With this knowledge, as well as some about how the body works, getting healthy for me took absolutely no willpower. All I did was look for the sweet spot in everything I did.

By choosing to approach healthy living this way, it means that I make my choices based on 2 things:

1) do I enjoy this?

2) Is this healthy for me?

Living a healthy lifestyle based on the critical point analysis concept allows for individuality. It also allows for the idea that for every healthy choice you make, the level of your pleasure indicates your efficiency level. The bonus to all this is that repeated, pleasing behaviour is habit forming and quickly becomes subconscious behaviour.

So I ask you: can the secret to making healthy living easy, really be to simply enjoy our healthy lifestyle choices?

If you’re left wondering how to go about finding your sweet spot, read this Live Lighter post: How to Use the Secret to Making Healthy Living Easy.