Take a moment and picture yourself in optimal health. How would you feel? How would you look? How would you move? What could you do or achieve? Do you want to have a better, healthier, longer life?

Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right – Henry Ford

You’re flooded with healthy living information. It’s difficult to keep up with it all. You’ve probably heard of one “expert” who maintains optimal health requires eating all organic fruits, contrasted by another who asserts that eating only meat is the best way to optimal health, and yet another who says optimal health requires strict food combining. You know that ALL of them can’t be right. In fact, it sometimes feels too exhausting to have to determine truth from falsehood.  

However, if you take a deep breath, center yourself, and listen to the small but steady voice deep within you, you’ve probably known all along what to do to have a healthy life. Doing what’s necessary, though, is even more difficult than knowing what to do. Doing is a challenge because most of us have to get rid of some bad habits and develop better habits in order to do what’s necessary to get great results.  

Habits can be hard to break, and even once broken, they can still seem to possess the power to pull you back to them. They’re hard to break because, if you think about it, none of us has habits we don’t like! 

So, to break them means changing something we like. Who wants to do that? So, the only reason to change a bad habit we like is the reward of getting something we like even MORE! Now, THAT sounds promising and completely doable!

Taking a look at our Morter HealthSystem recommendations of the Six Essentials for Life (what you eat and drink, how you exercise and rest, what and how you breathe, and what you think) is how you get started developing better habits. Following these recommendations, even starting slowly focusing on a little at a time, is how you start living every day with the optimal health you envision. Because, really, wouldn’t you like the windfall that comes with optimal health more than you like your current poor habits? That’s the motivation you need to lose your bad habits forever! And, you will find that the new healthier habits will become just as pleasing to you as the old “bad” ones – even more so because you have the bonus of being in optimal health!