Each Life By Design step bucks the trend of conventional wisdom, but none more so than our disapproval of “chronic cardio”.  “That’s blasphemy!” you say.  Everyone knows that in order to lose body fat and get lean you need to do spend a lot of time walking the infinite steps to nowhere on the climber.  Still not buying in?  Go to the gym, take a look at everyone running, walking, cycling and rowing.  Head back a year later and voila, no change.

How can that be? How can someone spend hours sweating it out on the treadmill in the cardio section and not lose body fat?

The power for an amazing birth is already in you.

More than any other process in the body, pregnancy highlights the extraordinary wisdom that governs the full expression of health and life.  We witness drastic external changes, feel internal transitions, but what we cannot see are the millions of different hormonal changes and chemical reactions occurring both in the mother and the developing baby. What we cannot fully comprehend is the level of intelligence required to orchestrate this beautiful perfection.

Evidenced by our own existence, we are designed to build and birth babies!  Sadly, most of our society has been taught to live in ways that are incompatible with the expression of normal, healthy function.

Nutrition is a field littered with so many experts and opinions that it becomes difficult and ultimately frustrating for people to “figure out” how they should be eating for optimal health.  How do you choose between Atkins, South Beach, Eat Right for Your Blood Type, Low Carb, High Carb, Low Fat, High Fat, Vegetarianism, Veganism, and hundreds of other approaches?

I think the answer may be much more simple.  If we wade through all the hyperbole, the mass marketing done by organizations with billion dollar budgets and the gurus, we find some universal principles  governing the nature of food, its purpose and how to best integrate these healthy practices into our families’ lives.  In those who have been able to do so, the results have been nothing short of miraculous.  But the miracle is not in the food itself; instead it is the amazing potential it unlocks in our incredibly designed bodies.

How do you know if you’re healthy?  Most people answer this question, “I feel good.” Although we all want to feel good, there is so much more to being healthy than how you feel! The World Health Organization defines health as: “a state of optimal physical, mental, and social well being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity”. Webster’s defines health as: “a state of wholeness in which all organs are functioning 100%, 100% of the time.”

Health is not only how you feel; it’s how you are functioning.