Take Charge Yourself – You Can

There are many ways to begin. What you choose to do depends entirely on you.

First, you have to know that better health is possible. If you don’t understand that, you have no agency to improve your decision making and the habits that create better health.

If you lack the courage to begin the outcome is certain. Take Charge, you can.

I know that you cannot know where a better health journey will lead you. That’s why we chose the tunnel image for the health coaching part of this website. You can’t see what’s at the end of tunnel. If you can’t begin the journey, you can’t begin to control your own outcome.

Do It Yourself – Take Charge

There are not nearly enough doctors, nurses, dieticians, physiotherapists, psychologists, or psychiatrists, to meet the health needs of the population. We can’t train them, we can’t afford to pay them, and most of us don’t have the income to employ these people privately. That’s a bad news story, but it’s real. On the other hand, if you are conscientious about your health, you can achieve a great deal and minimize the need for professional help. Make a plan, keep a written record, and seek help when you need it.

Your use of the medical system can be smaller, and your health much better. More-over, when you do go to a doctor, it will be obvious to him/her that you have worked hard to be healthy. That makes every difference to the conversation you have, and the options for future care he/she might offer you. That’s one of the values of being active in creating your own health.

I did exercise and train in my 50’s, but through my 60’s I did much less and slowly lost fitness and later my health. In my early 70’s I determined to recover my health, and I’ve been successful. BUT life is uncertain, negative events happen and at my age a sudden step down in health is likely. So, for me keeping up the amount of physical exercise I’m doing (about 12 hours a week at the moment) is important. You need to make your own plan. Can I suggest the Fitify App as one way to begin. Or train so that you can join parkrun in your district. The difference in capability of people who have made an effort to be fit, and those who are unfit is about 20 years superior. More power, more speed, more energy and less pain.

Ignore the minimal fitness guides for young people, 30 minutes of high intensity interval training three times a week might be fine when you are 40 and working full time. Older people have the time, many hours, to engage in fitness activities that are enjoyable and challenging, and social. Try to do that.

For my wife Carolyn and I ballroom dancing has always been important, but we have also embraced long hill walks, cycling, and TaiChi. Carolyn has a basketball hoop in the yard and tries to shoot 100 baskets every day, and she also plays tennis. I’ve got some light weights and neoprene bands in the garage to add difficulty and variety to my exercise programme when using Fitify. I also go to a gym three times a week. Looking at the Fitness at Age 70 in Quartiles, Carolyn and I are clearly in the third quartile, maybe moving into the fourth.

For more than 30 years, I’ve regularly written in various exercise books, about what interests me, and sometimes about my life and my fitness. When you are thinking about making changes in your life then keeping a journal, even for a short time is a sensible strategy. If at some stage you need to discuss your progress with a doctor, physiotherapist, dietician or a health coach, you have prepared the ground for success. You’ve built a foundation of knowledge. I strongly suggest you begin to build your own knowledge in your own book.

One of the most contentious issues has always been “What is the best human diet” and then for yourself, “What should I choose to eat.” The Dietary Guidelines for America became a standard for “what to eat” around the world, particularly in English speaking countries. However, we are getting sicker and less healthy since then, and type II diabetes, obesity, cancer and cardio-vascular disease are plagues in our society. Many of us have discovered that the “healthy diet” that we tried to eat as young people is not a healthy diet when we get older. Not sure why? I seem to have identified a pattern, as young people we ate a lot of rubbish and seemed to get away with it, then as our health declined, we tried to be vegetarian. That worked but later it failed. Finally, we end up eating many more animal foods, and far less fruit and vegetables. Maybe as we age, the quality of the protein we eat becomes more important.

By all means feel free to wander about the Main Open Future Health website. It has several parts: It begins here, and it has options for desktop, tablet and phone devices.

There is an introductory front end of about 15 URL’s that are a general introduction to the health I’ve been learning about over 10 years.

Behind that there is a website with about 300 URL’s. It has four main parts, plus a blog.

The main parts are:

The Lecture, over 8 years old, it takes about two hours. But it’s in eight parts and over a week it’s doable.

There’s a workshop; I’m not sure if anybody uses it, there’s a Nutrition Science Section, and a Section about Banting.

For People interested in Health System Bias, the TRIAL of Prof. Timothy Noakes might interest you.

There are two blogs: an old one with over 50 entries. It remains because there is useful stuff there. And a new one built on WordPress.

There is also a very long list of notable health experts I’ve discovered over the years, (At the moment a bit dated. 1 November, 2024) It’s a good place to explore and by the end of January 2025 it should have more recent material added.