You can't afford to get sick, and you can't depend on the present health care system to keep you well. It's up to you to protect and maintain your body's innate capacity for health and healing by making the right choices in how you live.
Interpretation
Health is primarily an individual's responsibility, not solely reliant on healthcare systems.
This quote emphasizes the importance of personal responsibility in maintaining one's health. Andrew Weil suggests that while the healthcare system plays a role in our well-being, the ultimate power to stay healthy lies in the choices we make in our daily lives, including our diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits.
In practice
During a wellness seminar, you might quote this to encourage participants to take control of their health.
There's no limit to what working with the breath can accomplishmy own first-hand experiences with this natural healing method have convinced me that breathing well may be the master key to good health. I recommend breath work to all my patients.
In my view, prescribing antidepressant drugs is too often a quick and easy substitute for developing treatment plans that address the totality of health concerns and lifestyle factors that have an impact on wellness, including emotional wellness.
Imagine that each time you inhale, that the universe is breathing into you, and as you exhale it is breathing out of you.
Dreaming is a phenomenon of purely individual consciousness, and consequently impossible to thoroughly deconstruct by a community of researchers. But dreaming matters.
Imagine a world in which medicine was oriented toward healing rather than disease, where doctors believed in the natural healing capacity of human beings and emphasized prevention above treatment. In such a world, doctors and patients would be partners working toward the same ends.
I have argued for years that we do not have a health care system in America. We have a disease-management system - one that depends on ruinously expensive drugs and surgeries that treat health conditions after they manifest rather than giving our citizens simple diet, lifestyle and therapeutic tools to keep them healthy.
Quality training is what I do now; before it was a combination of both quality and quantity. Now I'm not trying to be a world-class athlete, I don't need to train at that level. It's about being fit, fit for life.
Taking care of your body, no matter what your age, is an investment.
The health care industry can play a great role in this by being aware of the fact that these children form perhaps the most neglected group of people in the country, largely because it is hard to find them.
If I'm not hungry and I'm busy, I am quite happy to skip a meal. It's informal intermittent fasting. I feel strongly that this is one of the strongest areas of longevity research.
The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don't want, drink what you don't like, and do what you'd rather not.
I'm stopped. I'll never eat another burger.
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