By Dr. Mark Wiley

If you settle for what seems to be average health, you’re not as healthy as you could be. Instead, choosing to change your lifestyle choices offers remarkable enrichment. That decision — to do things like eating better food, de-stressing and exercising — can offer optimal health and make your life immeasurably better.

Measuring Sickness

Here’s a tough question: Do you know how sick you actually are?

That’s a tough one, I know. You certainly know when you have back pain, experience seasonal allergies or suffer through a headache. But are you otherwise healthy; I mean, really healthy? And how would you know if you were?

I think it is fair to assume that most people view health as the absence of pain, illness or disease. But that doesn’t fully describe health.

You can seem to be healthy and not suffer apparent ailments, but that doesn’t mean you have a rosy health future. Outward appearances and lack of physical illness markers are not reliable barometers of health. Even thin people can have high cholesterol, heart disease and fatty livers.

On the other hand, you may believe that your entire life is medically predetermined at birth by the genetic markers that predispose you to certain serious health concerns. For instance, you can’t be taller than your DNA genetically predetermines you to be unless you pull on Elton John’s boots. If you are genetically marked for cancer, you will likely get cancer. If you are genetically destined for Parkinson’s disease, you can only do your best to prevent its onset by making good health and lifestyle choices that strengthen immunity and balance your interior environment. And that applies to other health concerns.

Balancing Act

As a result, we each have both a baseline of everyday balanced health and a personal potential for optimal health. This baseline balance is called homeostasis. It is the environment in which the body functions at its best, at its most efficient.

Your personal potential is the optimal health you could reach if you knew where to find it and how to reach it. Can you be healthier than what you are genetically marked to be? No, sorry. But you can reach your health potential and be as healthy as you can be. Therefore, you should strive to actualize your personal potential rather than squander it, for this state alone holds the key to optimal health and pain-free living.

Reaching For Optimal Health

The fact is, most people never reach their optimal health potential and, therefore, never live in optimal health. Consider those before-and-after pictures of formerly obese people who became fit. They were not genetically doomed to be obese and unfit. They became that way little by little by virtue of poor health and lifestyle choices.

Yet, eventually, they strove for a better life, reached it and achieved better physical health. They had previously neglected to implement optimal lifestyle habits; but, once they changed, their bodies and lives improved dramatically.

Too many of us don’t strive to reach for our optimal health peak because we think we’re doing OK just the way we are or that nothing can be done to significantly improve our current state of health. If we had no means of improving our health, reality shows like “The Biggest Loser” and “Bulging Brides” would be impossible. Such programs enjoy vast audiences and display real-life success stories. Unfortunately, rather than making those kinds of choices for ourselves, many of us live vicariously through the contestants on these diet-and-exercise shows.

We all have unexplored potential. While we can often see the potential in others, we forget that we possess it ourselves.

On The Mediocre Path

Many of us seem content to stay on a mediocre path. We assume that being average is just fine and fashionable. It doesn’t have to be that way. It shouldn’t be that way. We were not put on this planet to suffer. We were born to excel. Yet far too many of us don’t even try.

Take a long, hard look at yourself in the mirror. Sit for a few minutes and take inventory of your personal health disparities, adverse signs and symptoms. A little introspection and focus can go a long way toward showing you just how far from balance you have strayed. Your current physical state says a great deal about your life choices up to this time. Your choices have led to your self-induced pain, illness or disease signs and symptoms. That needn’t be the case any longer. New choices can create a new you.

Change your choices. Change your health. And you forever change your life.

First, you must determine where you stand along the continuum of your personal health potential. That continuum of possibilities extends from a state of being gravely ill to being optimally well, and every other condition in between.

Optimal health is intimately linked to homeostasis, the balanced state of equilibrium, both within the body and in the relationship of that interior body with your exterior environments and stressors. Making strong wellness choices brings all of these elements closer to a middle balance, the place where homeostasis truly resides.

As long as your body maintains its balance, within normal range limits, you can remain vibrant and healthy. And if, as a result of healthy lifestyle choices, you optimize your health potential, you can, in effect, be cured of the everyday pains, illnesses and diseases that may have plagued you for years and even decades.

Sure, there are some adverse health conditions you may endure that are so far advanced that they cannot be entirely conquered. Yet reaching your balanced optimal health stops these conditions from developing further and may even reverse difficulties like diabetes and obesity. As for predetermined, genetic markers for disease: The latest consensus holds that they are indicators of being at risk, not a guarantee what you will necessary fall victim to particular illnesses.

If you make strong health and lifestyle choices, you can move toward your optimal health potential. Once you get there, you won’t want to turn back.