In 2007, I thought I was doing a pretty good job taking care of myself. I had been athletic most of my life. I ran. I lifted weights. I was strong. I was active.

And my body was falling apart.

I had seven different surgeries being recommended and had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Apparently being able to put a surprising amount of weight on a leg press wasn’t the comprehensive health plan I thought it was.

Maybe you’ve had your own version of that moment.

Maybe something hurts that didn’t used to hurt. Maybe you’ve stopped doing something you love because you’re not sure your body can handle it anymore. Maybe somebody handed you a diagnosis or told you, in one way or another, that this is simply what happens when you get older.

I don’t think that’s always the end of the story.

Peggy and I certainly didn’t know what our story was going to look like back then. So we started looking.

We studied, trained, experimented, found teachers, followed some strange side roads and tried a lot of things on ourselves before we ever asked anyone else to try them.

Some things helped enormously. Some didn’t. Some things we believed pretty strongly for a while and eventually changed our minds about.

We kept learning.

Eventually we opened our first RiversZen studio, where we could put all this stuff into practice with real people. For nearly two decades now, Peggy and I have been teaching, experimenting, watching what happens, asking questions and changing things when we find something that works better.

We’ve learned a hell of a lot. We’ve also been doing this long enough to be suspicious of the word always. People are different. Bodies are different. Lives are different.

But that doesn’t mean everything is a mystery.

There are things we’ve seen help people over and over again. Moving. Getting stronger. Eating in a way that works for you. Sleeping. Having people in your life who matter. Paying attention to what your own body and your own life are telling you.

And taking care of yourself doesn’t have to become another damn full-time job.

Sometimes I look at everything we’re now supposed to optimize and wonder when being healthy got so complicated. Sleep, steps, protein, glucose, VO2 max, microbiome, supplements, bone density.

Apparently we’re supposed to optimize our jaw now too.

More on that another day. It involves something called the Masticator Pro 5000™ and we’ve already gone too far.

After all these years, Peggy and I know a lot of complicated stuff. But we’ve also learned that living better can sometimes be remarkably simple.

Find things that help. Pay attention. Keep learning. Change your mind when you learn something better.

And let some of the bullshit go.

Somewhere along the way, this got bigger

RiversZen began because Peggy and I wanted to help people move and feel better. We still do. I love that work.

But somewhere along the way I realized I don’t actually care whether you can do a beautiful stretch.

I care whether being able to move helps you get down on the floor and back up, walk the beach, work in your garden, travel, play with somebody you love, or go wandering around some town you’ve never seen before because you want to know what’s around the corner.

I care whether your body gives you enough capacity to say yes when life gives you something worth saying yes to.

Health isn’t the destination. Life is.

That’s probably the easiest way to explain why Move Well Stay Healthy sometimes wanders all over the damn place.

I might write about movement or food or getting older. Something Peggy noticed. Something a student taught me. Something I got completely wrong. A medical study that made me curious. A person halfway around the world whose story I can’t stop thinking about.

Or my father. A drive-in movie. A bunch of pelicans.

Apparently, sauerkraut.

There isn’t a master plan hanging on the wall telling me what subject I’m supposed to write about next. There’s just a question Peggy and I have been asking in one form or another for a very long time:

What might help us live better?

We’ve already found quite a few answers.

We’re still looking for more.

If you’re new here, wander around

I’m not going to give you a syllabus. But if you’re trying to figure out what kind of place you’ve just walked into, here are a few places I’d wander next.

You Can’t Force Balance. Here’s What Actually Works.
Peggy and I have spent a lot of years watching people move. Balance is a pretty good example of why we don’t believe bodies respond particularly well to being bossed around. (Read the Story)

Where Did the Summer Go?
Not everything here is about fixing something. Sometimes it’s about noticing your life while you’re still in the middle of living it. (Read the Story)

I Eat Carnivore. And Today I Defend Your Plant-Based Diet.
I have opinions. Sometimes pretty strong ones. I also think we’d all be better off if we were a little more willing to question the arguments that happen to agree with us. (Read the Story)

Pelicans
Because sometimes you come through a tunnel, there are pelicans everywhere, and that’s enough reason for a story.

Read one. Read all four. Ignore me completely and click something else that looks interesting. That’s allowed too. (Read The Story)

If you like being here, stick around

Most of Move Well Stay Healthy is free, and I mean genuinely free. We publish several full articles every week, along with Notes, observations, stories and whatever else has made me stop and think.

Sometimes Peggy shows up.

Actually, Peggy shows up a lot.

We’re not giving you three paragraphs and then saying, “Want to know the secret? Give me your credit card.”

If you enjoy this kind of thing, subscribe for free and stay with us.

No complicated funnel. No webinar followed by a challenge followed by seventeen emails explaining that the doors close at midnight.

Just stick around and see what you think.

If you want to come farther inside

There is also a paid side of Move Well Stay Healthy. I’m not going to hide it, because Peggy and I aren’t embarrassed to charge for work that we believe helps people.

But paid membership isn’t simply more stuff to read. There’s already plenty to read for free. The difference is that membership gets more personal.

Sunday is our deeper private conversation with members. Wednesday is our simpler midweek knock on the door:

We’re still here. How are you doing?

Members tell us what’s working and what isn’t. They ask questions. Peggy and I answer.

We’ve spent years helping people figure out how to move better, feel better and keep doing more of what matters to them. Membership gives us a chance to bring more of that relationship into Move Well Stay Healthy.

Not another giant library of things you’ll never have time to finish. Not a perfect plan. Not a guru telling you exactly how to live your life.

Support. Conversation. Practical help. A couple of people who actually care how you’re doing.

The free stuff gives you plenty to think about.

Membership helps you do something with it.

BECOME A PAID MEMBER

And if you’re not ready for that, stay free and keep reading. You’re welcome here too.

We’re still looking

I don’t know exactly where Move Well Stay Healthy is going.

I hope I never do.

Not because Peggy and I don’t know what we’re doing. We’ve learned a tremendous amount over the years, and we’re happy to share it. But we’re still learning too.

We’re still experimenting, still meeting people who teach us things, still changing our minds when something better comes along. I’m still pulling the car over occasionally because something popped into my head and I don’t want to lose it.

After all these years, I remain convinced of something pretty simple:

Your life isn’t fixed.

Getting older doesn’t mean you have to quietly surrender everything you enjoy doing. There are things you can do. Things you can change. Things you may be able to get back.

And there are probably possibilities neither of us has thought about yet.

We’ve learned a lot about that.

We’re still looking.

Come with us.

The doctor was confident.

“I can assure you, there is nothing wrong with your kidney.”

Tamara Keith had been living with pain around her left kidney. Not a little twinge now and then. Over the next six years, she would be admitted to the hospital more than 30 times with severe pain, vomiting, dehydration and other symptoms.

She was treated repeatedly for kidney infections.

Most of the cultures came back negative.

The pain kept coming back anyway.

And eventually something else began to happen.

When the tests couldn’t explain Tamara’s symptoms, people began questioning Tamara.

Her pain was discredited. Her motives were questioned. Her honesty was doubted. She picked up labels along the way.

Functional.

Attention seeking.

And eventually one that caught my attention:

The annoying “expert patient.”

She kept looking anyway.

The thing nobody was finding

Eventually Tamara became convinced she knew what was wrong.

Nutcracker syndrome.

I’d never heard of it either.

The short version is that a vein carrying blood away from the left kidney can become compressed between other blood vessels. It is rare, and even the diagnosis and best treatment aren’t always straightforward.

In other words, this isn’t a story about some obvious condition a bunch of stupid doctors should have spotted immediately.

It was difficult.

That’s important to what happened next.

During another episode of pain, Tamara had an ultrasound.

This time a radiologist saw something.

He didn’t know what it was.

And that’s where the story changed.

After years of being told there was nothing wrong with her kidney, Tamara finally encountered someone willing to say, essentially:

I don’t know what’s wrong. But your left kidney isn’t normal.

Tamara later called that the transformative moment in her diagnostic journey.

Think about that.

The person who finally moved things forward wasn’t somebody who walked into the room knowing the answer.

It was somebody willing to admit that he didn’t.

Further imaging showed compression of Tamara’s left renal vein. Eventually a venogram measured an abnormal pressure gradient and confirmed the diagnosis.

Six years after she first presented with the problem, Tamara finally had a name for it.

There’s something I haven’t told you about Tamara

Tamara wasn’t simply spending those years reading medical information because she was desperate to understand what was happening to her.

She was a medical student.

She was trying to become a doctor while spending much of her twenties as a patient.

And she had arrived at her suspected diagnosis herself.

Tamara later wrote that she’d figured out it was nutcracker syndrome before many of the clinicians treating her had even heard of it.

Which apparently didn’t make her particularly popular.

As she put it:

“Consultants do not take kindly to being taught by medical students.”

Okay. That made me laugh.

But imagine being Tamara.

You hurt.

You know something is wrong.

You’ve spent years learning everything you can because your life has basically forced you to.

You believe you’ve found the answer.

And your growing knowledge becomes one more reason some people find you difficult.

Her story didn’t suddenly become easy

This is where I’d love to give you the movie ending.

Diagnosis. Treatment. Everybody goes home happy.

That’s not what happened.

Tamara’s symptoms were debilitating enough that she eventually chose major surgery. Her left kidney was removed and transplanted to the other side of her body.

The symptoms that had plagued her disappeared.

Then came a serious complication involving the artery supplying the transplanted kidney. More procedures followed. Ultimately, the kidney had to be removed.

Seven years after that final surgery, when Tamara wrote about her experience, she said she’d had no further medical problems.

And by then there was another change.

The annoying “expert patient” had become Dr. Tamara Keith, a general practice partner and trainer teaching other doctors.

That’s one hell of a rest of the story.

Maybe the “expert patient” isn’t such a strange idea

Tamara’s story sent me looking.

I wondered how often people living with complicated or rare conditions end up becoming remarkably knowledgeable about the thing affecting them.

Apparently, enough that researchers actually study it.

One systematic review of 21 qualitative studies involving people with rare disorders found the “expert patient” phenomenon in 12 of them. Patients searched for information, learned medical terminology, followed research and treatment developments, and sometimes found themselves knowing more about their particular rare condition than healthcare professionals they encountered.

That doesn’t mean they knew more medicine.

They knew more about this.

The one thing that had taken over a chunk of their lives.

Another study interviewing people with rare diseases and healthcare professionals found something similar. Patients can develop extensive knowledge from living with and researching their disease, while clinicians may have little experience with a condition they rarely encounter.

When you think about it, that shouldn’t be terribly surprising.

A doctor has to know about an enormous range of conditions.

A patient with a rare disease may wake up every morning thinking about one.

This is where I think we get ourselves into trouble

I don’t expect doctors to know everything.

Nobody can.

I have enormous respect for somebody who has spent years learning medicine and then spends a career trying to help people with problems ranging from ordinary to bizarre.

But here’s the double standard that bothers me.

We can understand why a doctor might know relatively little about an obscure condition.

Yet when the person actually living with that condition spends years trying to understand it, sometimes we decide they’ve been Googling too much.

Or now, I suppose, asking GPT too many damn questions.

Patients can absolutely be wrong.

Google can be wrong. GPT can be wrong. Some guy screaming into a microphone on YouTube can be spectacularly wrong.

Health anxiety is real. Bad information is everywhere. Reading research papers doesn’t magically turn somebody into a physician.

But none of that means the person sitting on the examination table brings nothing valuable to the conversation.

They’ve been living in the body you’re discussing.

They know what hurts.

They know when it started.

They know what makes it better.

They know what makes it worse.

They know what has changed.

And if they’ve lived with something for five or ten years, they may have spent an extraordinary amount of time learning about the one condition their doctor might encounter once in a career.

That knowledge doesn’t replace medical expertise.

Why would we want it to?

The two kinds of knowledge can help each other.

My favorite person in Tamara’s story

After everything Tamara went through, my favorite person in the story might still be that radiologist.

He didn’t solve the mystery on the spot.

He didn’t pretend to know something he didn’t know.

He looked.

He listened.

And he was willing to admit uncertainty.

Tamara herself eventually wrote that doctors shouldn’t be afraid to say they don’t know and ask others for help. She believed humility and honesty could sometimes matter more than already having the answer.

That’s not an argument against doctors.

That’s the kind of doctor I want.

And I think there’s a responsibility on the other side of the examination table too.

Learn.

Ask questions.

Pay attention to your body.

Bring good information with you.

Be curious.

And be willing to discover that you’re wrong.

You don’t have to prove your doctor wrong to participate in your own healthcare.

Your doctor knows things you don’t know.

You know things your doctor doesn’t know.

Maybe the best conversations happen when neither person feels threatened by that.

Tamara’s story began with somebody telling her:

“I can assure you, there is nothing wrong with your kidney.”

Years later, she remembered most fondly the doctor who was willing to tell her something very different:

I don’t know what’s wrong. But something isn’t right.

Sometimes that’s where the answer begins.

I changed the Qigong class again this morning.

Nothing dramatic. Nobody was injured. Peggy hasn’t revoked my teaching privileges. 😂

There were just a few stretches we’d been doing standing that had never felt quite right to me. I’d been thinking about them for a while.

So I changed them.

Read more

I came through the tunnel this morning and there were pelicans everywhere.

Not a couple of pelicans.

Pelicans everywhere.

I was driving from Long Beach down to our RiversZen studio in Astoria. It’s a beautiful drive anyway, especially once you get near the Columbia River, but this morning was something else.

The day before I’d seen an eagle having lunch outside the port window. That gave me an idea for a Driving with Dave, and since I still had about ten minutes before I got to the studio, I grabbed my phone recorder so I wouldn’t forget what I wanted to say.

Then I went through the Fort Columbia Tunnel.

And apparently somebody had scheduled a pelican convention.

Peggy and I Have a Thing for Pelicans

The water is right beside the road there, separated by a low wall of boulders that keeps the Columbia from splashing all over the highway. The pelicans started just a few feet beyond that wall.

Some were feeding. Some were flying. Some were just hanging around on the water. Terns and cormorants were mixed in with them, and the whole thing seemed to stretch maybe a quarter of the way across the river.

Astoria was sitting there in the background.

I wish I could tell you I calmly appreciated the beauty of the moment.

I didn’t.

I was more like:

Holy crap. Look at all the pelicans.

Peggy and I love pelicans. In fact, I’ve said for years that if I get a choice, I might like to come back in my next life as one.

They just look cool.

Especially the brown pelicans. They’ll fly in a line barely above the water, rising and falling with the waves. I always thought they looked like they were surfing.

Turns out they pretty much are.

Brown pelicans can use the air rising off waves to help them glide along the surface. Then, when they’re hungry, they can go from graceful surfer to guided missile, folding themselves up and plunging into the water after fish.

I’m not particularly fond of seafood.

But I assume reincarnation takes care of dietary preferences.

Apparently September Is Pelican Time

I got curious after I arrived at the studio and started looking into what I had just seen.

Brown pelicans don’t breed here. The ones we see along the Washington coast are California Brown Pelicans that move north after breeding, following food along the Pacific Coast.

And here’s something I didn’t know.

Late July through early September is generally when their numbers peak along the Washington coast.

So apparently I picked a pretty good morning to drive to Astoria.

The Columbia River estuary is important pelican territory too. Thousands of brown pelicans have gathered around East Sand Island over the years, feeding in the estuary and using the area to rest.

Which brings me to another thing I like about pelicans.

They seem perfectly capable of doing absolutely nothing. They feed. They fly. They dive. And then sometimes they just sit there.

Nobody appears to be worried about whether they’re getting enough steps.

Then I Got to Work

Eventually I had to leave my pelican convention and continue to Astoria. I pulled into the parking lot at RiversZen.

And here came six enormous white pelicans flying right over my car.

American White Pelicans are completely different-looking birds. They can have wingspans around nine feet, and unlike the browns, they don’t normally crash headfirst into the water for lunch.

They tend to feed from the surface, sometimes working together to move fish into shallower water where they’re easier to catch. They’re also wonderful soaring birds.

Six of them going over your head gets your attention.

Although my first thought wasn’t particularly educational.

Please don’t poop on the car.

If you’ve ever cleaned pelican crap off a vehicle, you understand.

Thankfully, everybody maintained proper altitude and bowel control.

Another successful arrival at RiversZen.

I Hope I Never Stop Doing This

I’ve made that drive a lot. I know the bridge, the tunnel, the river, and where Astoria starts appearing across the water.

It would be very easy for all of it to become background scenery. Just the stuff outside the windshield while I’m thinking about where I’m going, what I have to do when I get there, whether the sound system is going to behave today, what we’re having for lunch, or whatever else happens to be bouncing around inside my head.

But this morning I came through that tunnel and for a few minutes the pelicans got all of me.

Maybe that’s why I’m sitting here writing about them.

We spend a lot of time talking about how to live better. Eat this. Don’t eat that. Exercise. Sleep. Stretch. Breathe. Take this supplement. Don’t take that one. Track your steps, your sleep, your heart rate, and apparently anything else that will hold still long enough to be measured.

Some of that information is useful. I write about it myself.

But I don’t want to become so busy trying to live a healthy life that I forget to have one.

I want to keep coming through tunnels and occasionally being surprised by what’s waiting on the other side. I want to still get excited when an eagle is eating lunch outside my window. I want to look up when six giant white birds fly over my head. I want to notice something I’ve seen a hundred times and somehow see it differently on the hundred-and-first.

Maybe that’s part of why Peggy and I care so much about staying strong, mobile and capable as we get older.

Not so we can win some imaginary fitness competition.

So we can keep participating in all of this.

There are probably extraordinary things happening around us every day. Some are big. Some are tiny. Some may be sitting just outside the window while we’re staring at our phones.

And apparently, on a Wednesday morning in September, some of them are waiting on the other side of the Fort Columbia Tunnel.

I still think I’d make a pretty good pelican.

We just need to work out that seafood problem.

I want you to pay attention to your hands this week. Not measure them. Not grade them. Just notice what they can still do.

Can you open the jars in your kitchen? Carry grocery bags from the car? Work comfortably with your garden tools? Wring out a wet towel? Pick up something heavy without worrying that it might slip?

And here’s the more important question:

Has any of that quietly changed?

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I went to the San Diego Sports Clinic because I wanted someone to help me.

I was hurting. Both feet. My right knee. My lower back. My shoulder. My hip.

I expected physical therapy. Exercises. Maybe somebody would show me what I was doing wrong and give me something I could work on.

The doctor spent quite a bit of time with me. He asked a lot of questions, did an evaluation, and then sat down and very matter-of-factly told me what he thought might be ahead.

More testing first. But probably a series of seven surgeries over the next couple of years. He even suggested a wheelchair might eventually be in my future.

That scared the daylights out of me.

I was 53 years old. This wasn’t the future I had pictured.

So Peggy and I Started Looking

I didn’t storm out of the doctor’s office convinced that he was wrong.

I didn’t know if he was wrong.

I just knew I wasn’t ready to accept that surgery after surgery was the only road available to me.

So Peggy and I started doing research. Not because we knew what we were doing.

Because we didn’t.

We found resistance stretching. I tried it. Something started changing.

We found a Rolfer who was able to give me relief in my feet. That helped too.

One thing led to another. We read. We asked questions. We found people who knew things we didn’t know. We tried things that made sense to us and paid attention to what happened.

Some helped more than others.

But slowly, I started getting my body back.

Nobody Handed Us the Answer

That’s the part I sometimes forget when I tell the story now.

Nineteen years later, I know a heck of a lot more about movement than I did then. Peggy and I eventually trained extensively in resistance stretching. We became Master Trainers. We studied yoga and other movement practices. We opened RiversZen.

Looking backward, it can almost seem like there was a path.

There wasn’t.

There was just the next thing. And then the next thing.

We didn’t know where any of it was leading. We just kept looking.

That’s why I’ve become such a believer in taking responsibility for your own health. But I want to be careful about what I mean by that.

It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go to doctors. It doesn’t mean you should ignore medical advice. And it certainly doesn’t mean you should diagnose yourself with something you found on the internet at two in the morning.

Good grief.

Taking responsibility doesn’t mean doing everything yourself.

Sometimes it means finding more people to help you.

Nobody Will Care Quite Like You Do

I’ve had good doctors. I’ve learned from wonderful teachers. I’ve worked with talented practitioners who knew things I didn’t.

I needed those people. I still do.

But none of them wakes up in my body every morning. None of them knows exactly what it feels like when I bend over, climb a flight of stairs, get out of bed, teach a class, or walk down the street.

And none of them has as much riding on the outcome as I do.

That’s my job.

I can ask questions. I can get another opinion. I can learn. I can decide that something doesn’t feel right and ask why.

I can try a reasonable alternative and pay attention to what happens. I can change direction when something isn’t working. And I can accept help when I need it.

That’s not rejecting expertise.

That’s participating.

You Don’t Have to Know the Answer

I think this is where people sometimes get stuck. They know something needs to change, but they don’t know what to do.

So they wait.

I understand that.

When I walked out of that sports clinic, I didn’t have an answer either.

I had fear.

And Peggy.

That turned out to be a pretty good start.

We didn’t solve nineteen years of health problems that afternoon. We found one thing to try. Then another.

That’s all you may need to do too.

Maybe there’s something in your life you’ve quietly accepted because you assume that’s just the way it is now. Pain. Stiffness. Poor balance. No energy. Difficulty getting off the floor.

Maybe you’ve already been told what your future looks like.

I can’t tell you that the answer is resistance stretching. I can’t tell you there’s always another solution. Sometimes surgery is exactly the right answer. Sometimes medication is. Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is listen to the expert sitting across from you.

But you can still participate.

Ask questions.

Understand your choices. Get another opinion when it makes sense. Find people you trust. Learn what you can. And pay attention to your own body along the way.

Nobody Is Coming

I still believe that. Just not the way I once might have said it.

Plenty of people may come along who can help you. If you’re fortunate, you’ll find some really good ones.

But nobody is coming to take ownership of your health for you.

That part belongs to you.

At 53, I didn’t know how dramatically my life was about to change. I didn’t know there would someday be a RiversZen. I didn’t know I’d be teaching movement at 72.

I certainly didn’t know Peggy and I would spend the next nineteen years helping other people find possibilities in bodies they’d started giving up on.

All I knew was that I had just been shown a future that scared me.

So we kept looking.

Maybe that’s where taking control of your health begins. Not with knowing the answer. Not with having the perfect plan. Not with waiting for someone to rescue you.

With deciding you’re going to keep looking.

Curious about the member side of Move Well Stay Healthy? You can try it free for 7 days. Come see what we're doing.

CJ and Cheeks are brother and sister. Same litter. Born minutes apart. Number one and number two.

Kim was the breeder, so these two little characters have been part of the family from the very beginning. They are spirited. They are curious. They are full of life.

And they are apparently responsible for protecting our home from every squirrel in the Pacific Northwest.

It’s a big job.

We Are Under Attack

Right outside our front door is a row of those very tall Northwest trees. The squirrels love them.

CJ and Cheeks do not.

One squirrel appears outside the front window and you’d think somebody had breached the perimeter. The littles race to the window.

Barking. Scrambling.

SQUIRREL!

When the dogs are in the backyard, it’s even worse. The squirrels have figured out exactly how this works. They sit on top of the fence. Safe. Watching.

I’m pretty sure they’re laughing.

CJ and Cheeks are below, absolutely losing their minds while the squirrels torment the daylights out of them.

Five minutes later?

Crisis over. Nap time.

There may be something in that.

They Are Not Wellness Experts

I watch these two and sometimes think dogs have figured out a few things we’ve made unnecessarily complicated.

CJ and Cheeks have never counted a macro. They don’t know their step count. They have no idea whether their walk was Zone 2. They’ve never worried about whether they got enough deep sleep last night.

They wake up and stretch. They run when something makes them want to run. They play. They rest. They get excited about going outside even though they’ve been outside approximately 14,000 times before.

And when they’re tired?

They sleep.

No guilt. No thought that perhaps they should be doing something more productive with their afternoon. Just...

I’m tired. I’m going to lie down now.

I admire that.

But let’s not get carried away and pretend dogs possess some ancient wisdom we’ve lost. Because Cheeks is also our resident vacuum cleaner.

Everything on the floor goes into her mouth.

And recently we put dog-safe snail pellets around Peggy’s dahlias. Apparently CJ considers them a delicacy.

So much for instinct always knowing best.

Sometimes your body sends you useful information. Sometimes your body apparently says:

Eat the snail pellets.

A little judgment still comes in handy.

Maybe We Don’t Need to Optimize Everything

That’s really what watching these two makes me think about.

We’ve become very good at measuring ourselves. Food. Sleep. Steps. Heart rate. Blood sugar. Exercise. Recovery.

There can be value in all of that. Information can teach us things we might otherwise miss.

But I wonder if sometimes all that measuring makes us forget to experience the thing we’re measuring.

A walk becomes 6,342 steps. Dinner becomes 37 grams of protein. Sleep becomes a score. Exercise becomes calories burned.

And pretty soon we’re not living.

We’re collecting data about living.

CJ and Cheeks don’t have that problem. When there’s something interesting outside, they notice it.

Granted, they then bark at it until the rest of us consider moving to another state.

But they noticed it.

Then There’s Dinner

CJ and Cheeks aren’t always models of good behavior.

Until I start filling their food bowls.

The transformation is remarkable. Two dogs who moments earlier may have been defending civilization from a squirrel suddenly become perfect little angels.

They sit tall. Quiet. Patient.

Those innocent little faces look up at me.

Who, us? We’ve been sitting here peacefully all day.

Sure you have.

But watch them when those bowls hit the floor. They aren’t thinking about yesterday’s dinner. They aren’t worried about tomorrow’s breakfast. They aren’t checking their phones while they eat.

For that moment, dinner is the greatest thing that has ever happened.

Then it’s over. And they’re off to whatever comes next.

Maybe That’s What I Want to Keep

Not the barking. Definitely not eating everything that hits the floor. And I’ll pass on the snail pellets.

But I don’t want to become so focused on living correctly that I forget how to love being alive.

I want to stay curious. Notice things. Move because there’s somewhere interesting to go. Rest when I need it. Play. Enjoy my food. Get outside.

And occasionally become ridiculously excited about something that probably isn’t important at all.

We talk a lot around RiversZen about staying capable as we get older. Strength matters. Balance matters. Mobility matters.

But those things aren’t the destination.

They’re what allow us to keep participating.

That’s the destination.

Maybe that’s one little thing CJ and Cheeks can teach us. Not that dogs know better than doctors. Not that instinct is always right. Certainly not that anything scattered around Peggy’s dahlias should be considered an appetizer.

Just this:

Pay attention to your life while you’re living it.

There’s probably something interesting happening right outside the window.

And if you’re lucky... it might be a squirrel. 😂

Curious about the member side of Move Well Stay Healthy? You can try it free for 7 days. Come see what we're doing.

Sunday we talked about noticing those little moments when your body makes you hesitate.

Getting out of the chair. Taking the stairs. Walking across uneven ground. Getting onto the floor. Maybe somethi…

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I started working at Thrifty Drugs in 1972 and vitamins weren’t the giant business they are today. As I remember it, we had maybe three feet of shelf space devoted to them.

I didn’t know much about vitamins. Honestly, I barely knew they existed. So one day I asked our pharmacist about them.

Were they actually useful?

He told me they certainly could be.

“Take a fistful and do bicep curls. That’s probably the best use for them.”

I never forgot that.

Fifty-four years later, I’m not sure I’d go quite that far. But some mornings, looking at the number of pills, powders, gummies and capsules we’re being told we need, I wonder if that old pharmacist wasn’t onto something.

When Did We Become So Deficient?

Walk through the supplement section today and it’s hard not to come away thinking the human body is missing half its parts.

Something for your heart. Something for your brain. Something for your joints. Something for sleep. Something for energy. Something for digestion.

Something to help you relax after taking all the stuff that’s supposed to give you energy.

We’ve come a long way from those three feet of shelves at Thrifty Drugs.

And I’m skeptical.

Not because I think every supplement is worthless. I don’t. Sometimes there’s a real deficiency. Sometimes there’s a specific reason for taking something. Sometimes your diet or circumstances make it difficult to get enough of a particular nutrient.

Great.

Know why you’re taking it.

What bothers me is the idea that a cabinet full of supplements has somehow become part of the price of admission for being healthy.

I don’t think it is.

Food Got Boring

Here’s the problem with telling people to eat real food.

There’s not much of a sales pitch.

Eat some eggs. Have some fish. Eat meat if you like meat. Vegetables if you like vegetables. Stay away from the highly processed junk.

Move your body. Get outside. Sleep.

Repeat tomorrow.

Where’s the exciting new discovery in that? Where’s the bottle? Where’s the subscription? Where’s the influencer holding up this month’s miracle ingredient?

Good health can be surprisingly boring.

That’s one of the things I like about it.

There Is Another Reason I’m Cautious

Supplements aren’t regulated the same way prescription drugs are. Generally, the FDA doesn’t approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness before they reach the shelf. The responsibility starts largely with the companies selling them.

That doesn’t mean everything in the supplement aisle is dangerous. It does mean I think you should know what you’re buying.

The original research that got me thinking about this included a 2023 study of 57 sports supplements. According to the research summarized in my notes, 89% had inaccurate labels, 40% didn’t contain a detectable amount of the ingredient listed, and some contained prohibited ingredients.

That’s enough to get my attention.

Not enough to make me throw every vitamin bottle in America into the trash. But certainly enough to make me ask questions.

Maybe Open the Cabinet

That’s really all I’m suggesting.

Take a look at whatever you’re swallowing every morning. Pick up each bottle and ask:

Why am I taking this?

Not, What does the label say it does?

Why are you taking it?

Did testing show that you needed it? Did a doctor or another qualified professional recommend it for a specific reason? Did you research it yourself and find good evidence?

Or did somebody mention it on a podcast three years ago, you ordered a bottle, and you’ve been taking it ever since?

And here’s another good question:

Is it doing anything?

I think those are fair questions. Especially when something has quietly become part of your daily routine for years.

I’m Still With the Pharmacist... Mostly

My own health changed dramatically beginning in 2007. I lost 98 pounds. Movement became part of my daily life. The way I ate changed. Eventually the way I thought about health changed too.

It wasn’t one magic thing.

And it certainly wasn’t a magic capsule.

That’s probably why I’ve remained such a skeptic. I don’t want to replace one kind of dependency with another. I don’t want to spend my life believing health lives in a medicine cabinet, whether the bottle says prescription on it or has a picture of a green leaf.

I want to give my body good raw materials. I want to use it. I want to pay attention to what happens.

And if someday there’s a good reason for me to take something?

Fine.

Just give me the reason.

So no, I wouldn’t completely endorse my Thrifty Drugs pharmacist’s supplement advice today.

But if you’ve got a fistful of pills you’re taking every morning and you aren’t quite sure why... maybe put them down for a minute.

Don’t stop something medically necessary or prescribed without talking to the appropriate professional.

Just ask the question.

Do I actually need this?

Then, while you’re figuring that out, you can always do the bicep curls. 😁

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For years we were told that moderate drinking was fine. Maybe even good for us. A glass of red wine with dinner practically came with a little health halo floating over it.

Then the message started changing.

In 2025, the U.S. Surgeon General issued an advisory linking alcohol consumption to at least seven types of cancer. Alcohol was identified as the third leading preventable cause of cancer in the United States, behind tobacco and obesity.

That’s not exactly the same message many of us grew up hearing. And now the government guidelines are changing again.

It would be easy to turn this into another argument about who’s right, who’s wrong, who funded what, and which group got somebody’s ear in Washington. I’m not particularly interested in doing that.

Because there’s something much more useful to remember.

Your liver doesn’t read federal guidelines.

The Advice Changes. Your Biology Doesn’t.

Government recommendations change. Nutrition advice changes.

Sometimes that’s because the science gets better. Sometimes new evidence changes the way old evidence is understood. Sometimes reasonable people look at the same information and reach different conclusions.

That’s science.

And yes, politics and money can find their way into health policy too. Humans are involved, after all.

But none of that changes what happens inside your body when you drink alcohol. Your cells don’t check the latest government website first. Alcohol enters your body and your body has to deal with it.

We now have strong evidence connecting alcohol consumption with cancers of the breast, colon and rectum, esophagus, liver, mouth, throat, and voice box. And for some cancers, increased risk may begin around one drink a day or even less.

That’s worth knowing. Not panicking about. Not fighting about.

Knowing.

So What Do You Do With That?

That’s where I think health conversations sometimes go sideways. We learn that something carries risk and immediately divide into teams.

Alcohol is poison!

A glass of wine never hurt anybody!

Everybody picks a jersey and we’re off to the races.

What if we simply looked at the information and paid attention?

Peggy and I don’t drink anymore. I’ve written before about the funny way that happened. We never decided to quit. Somewhere along the road of eating differently, moving every day, sleeping better, and paying more attention to how we felt, alcohol simply disappeared from our lives.

We didn’t even notice we’d stopped until years later.

That’s our story.

It doesn’t have to be yours.

I’m Not Coming for Your Beer

If you enjoy a beer with friends or a glass of wine with dinner, I’m not hiding behind your chair with a cancer study.

Good grief. Nobody would invite me anywhere.

But I do think you deserve good information. And once you have it, you get to decide what to do with it.

Maybe nothing changes. Maybe you drink a little less. Maybe you notice that the one glass of wine you really enjoy has quietly become two or three you barely think about. Maybe you try going without it for a few weeks and see what happens.

How do you sleep? How do you feel the next morning? How is your energy? Do you miss the alcohol itself, or do you miss the ritual around it?

Those questions interest me a whole lot more than arguing about whether the government should recommend one drink, two drinks, or none.

You Get the Final Vote

I’ve become more skeptical of universal rules as I’ve gotten older. Not because experts have nothing useful to teach us.

They absolutely do.

I want the research. I want good doctors. I want people studying these things and telling us what they’re learning.

But I don’t want to hand them the final vote.

That’s mine. And yours belongs to you.

Take the information. Look at your own habits. Pay attention to your body.

Then make the decision that gives you the best chance of being strong, healthy, clear-headed, and able to enjoy this life for as long as possible.

The guidelines will change again. They always do.

Your body will still be there quietly giving you information.

Maybe we should listen to it too.

The free stuff gives you plenty to think about. Membership helps you do something with it. Join us.

Try eating a mouthful of grass.

Actually, don’t.

But if you did, you wouldn’t get much out of it. Your digestive system isn’t built to turn grass and other tough, fibrous plants into dinner.

A cow’s is.

That’s one of those simple things I’ve known forever but never really stopped to think about.

A cow can stand on a hillside that isn’t particularly useful for growing vegetables, eat plants you and I couldn’t live on, and turn them into beef and milk.

She can also eat certain leftovers and by-products from crops and food production that humans don’t normally eat.

That’s pretty remarkable when you think about it.

We talk a lot these days about complicated ways to make food more sustainable. New products. New factories. New technology.

Meanwhile, the cow has been running her own fermentation system for a very long time.

No software update required.

The Part We Sometimes Miss

This doesn’t mean every cow is raised on nothing but grass on some beautiful hillside with Julie Andrews singing in the background.

Modern agriculture is complicated.

Cattle can eat grain. Different farming systems use different feeds. There are legitimate questions about land use, animal welfare, soil health, water, methane, and how our food is produced.

Those conversations are worth having.

But there’s another side of the story that doesn’t get nearly as much attention.

Ruminants have an unusual ability to take plants and plant material humans can’t digest and turn them into food humans can eat.

That’s not an opinion. That’s biology.

And it makes me wonder whether we’ve made some of our conversations about food far more complicated than they need to be.

I Keep Coming Back to Real Food

I’ve experimented with food for most of my adult life.

At 53, I was overweight, diabetic, hurting, and headed someplace I didn’t particularly want to go.

Changing how I ate was a huge part of changing my life.

Over the years I’ve tried different versions of real-food eating. I’ve adjusted. Experimented. Been wrong. Changed my mind.

And yes, occasionally wandered face-first into something I knew perfectly well wasn’t going to make me feel good.

Apparently knowing better does not provide immunity from being human.

A couple of years ago I experimented with eating mostly animal foods.

Beef. Eggs. Butter. Salt.

What surprised me wasn’t some number on a spreadsheet.

It was how I felt.

My hunger changed. My energy became steadier. A lot of the aches and inflammation I’d been living with became quieter. I stopped thinking about food all day.

At 72, I’m still teaching movement classes every day, moving well, and enjoying my life.

That matters more to me than winning an argument about diets.

And it certainly doesn’t mean everybody should eat exactly like I do.

I’ve worked with people for years who thrive eating very differently.

My advice has become much simpler:

Eat what helps you thrive.

Not what Dave eats.

Not what your favorite doctor on YouTube eats.

Not what the latest book says every human being on Earth is supposed to eat.

Pay attention to your own body and your own life.

Maybe Simple Isn’t So Bad

One thing I do believe we’ve gotten backward is our tendency to distrust simple food while becoming strangely comfortable with food that requires an ingredient list you need reading glasses to finish.

Beef is food.

Eggs are food.

Vegetables are food.

Fruit is food.

If those foods help you thrive, wonderful.

I’m much more skeptical when we take a whole food, tear it apart, isolate pieces of it, process those pieces, add other ingredients back in, manufacture it into something new, and then tell ourselves we’ve improved upon nature.

Maybe sometimes we have.

I’m just not convinced we always have.

Interestingly, even the newest U.S. Dietary Guidelines have shifted toward a remarkably simple message:

Eat real food.

Well, look at that.

Only took us a few decades.

And Back to the Cow

There’s something beautifully simple about her.

Grass grows.

Cow eats grass.

You cannot digest the grass.

She can.

Then she turns it into highly nutritious food containing complete protein, vitamin B12, iron, zinc, and other nutrients our bodies can use.

We can argue about the perfect human diet until the cows come home.

Sorry. That one was sitting there. I had no choice.

I’d rather ask a more useful question:

What foods help you feel strong, clear-headed, energetic, and able to keep doing the things you love?

Start there.

Pay attention.

Keep the foods that help.

Question the ones that don’t.

And don’t be afraid to change your mind when your own body teaches you something new.

As for me?

I’m still pretty impressed by that cow.

The best plant-based food processor I’ve ever seen has four legs and doesn’t need to be plugged in

I was sitting at Cape Disappointment the other day looking out at the water.

No waves to speak of. Nothing dramatic happening. Just one of those beautiful mornings where sitting there feels like a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

And for some reason, I started thinking about surfing.

I grew up in Southern California. There was a time in my life when I could look at a decent set of waves and my first thought would have been:

I need to get in there.

Not what a beautiful ocean.

Not what a peaceful morning.

Get the board. Let’s go.

That was me.

And I loved that guy.

But sitting there at Cape D, I realized something.

I don’t particularly want to be that guy anymore.

Maybe I’m just done with that.

And strangely enough, that doesn’t make me sad.

We talk a lot about what we shouldn’t give up

Especially as we get older.

Keep moving.

Keep your strength.

Work on your balance.

Stay curious.

Get out of the chair.

Keep doing the things you love.

Hell, I say some version of that almost every day.

And I believe every word of it.

I don’t want you deciding at 60 or 70 that your life is basically over because somebody told you you’re old now.

If you want to hike, let’s keep you hiking.

If you want to travel, let’s keep you traveling.

If you want to garden, dance, ride a horse, get down on the floor with your grandkids or wander around Cape Disappointment with your wife, let’s keep your body capable of doing those things.

That’s why I care about health in the first place.

But sitting there looking at the ocean, another thought occurred to me.

What if you don’t want to do something anymore?

That’s different.

I don’t owe my younger self an encore

There’s a funny message buried inside a lot of the healthy-aging world.

You’re supposed to keep proving you’ve still got it.

The 80-year-old runs the marathon.

The 70-year-old is still doing whatever the 30-year-olds are doing.

And those stories can be wonderful.

If an 80-year-old loves running marathons, fantastic.

I’ll be over here clapping.

Probably from a chair. 😂

But I don’t think living well means spending the rest of your life trying to prove you can still do everything you used to do.

Some things end because our bodies won’t let us do them anymore.

That’s frustrating.

That’s one reason I teach what I teach.

But sometimes a chapter ends because...

we’re finished with it.

No tragedy.

No surrender.

No decline.

We’re just done.

I don’t need to paddle into cold water today to prove that the kid from Southern California is still hiding somewhere inside me.

I know what catching a wave feels like.

I remember paddling out.

I remember the anticipation.

I remember standing up and feeling that board take off underneath me.

I got to have that chapter.

It was great.

Maybe what counts as participating changes

This may be the part I’ve come to appreciate more as I’ve gotten older.

There are a lot of ways to participate in life.

At one age, you jump in.

At another, maybe you watch.

Sometimes you teach.

Sometimes you cheer for somebody else.

Sometimes you sit beside the person you love and enjoy the view.

None of those has to be the lesser experience.

Actually, I think I’ve spent enough of my life charging toward the next thing that I’m getting pretty damn good at appreciating where I already am.

Maybe I’m a peaceful and more relaxed dude now.

Peggy may want to review that statement before publication. 😂

But I think there’s some truth in it.

Saying yes doesn’t always mean doing more

We’ve been talking around here a lot lately about staying capable enough to keep saying yes to life.

I love that idea.

But maybe I’ve been thinking about the word yes too narrowly.

Yes doesn’t always mean climbing the mountain.

Sometimes it’s sitting at the bottom looking at the mountain and thinking:

That’s gorgeous.

Yes can mean trying something new.

It can also mean realizing you don’t need to recreate something old.

Yes can be hanging on.

And yes can be letting go.

The important thing, at least to me, is that you’re choosing.

You’re not giving up surfing because somebody told you 72-year-olds shouldn’t surf.

You’re not running into the Pacific Ocean in February because somebody on Instagram told you 72-year-olds should surf.

You’re paying attention to the person you are now.

What do you still love?

What do you want to try?

What makes you curious?

What makes you feel alive?

And what can you finally look at with a smile and say:

“Nah. I already did that. It was great.”

There should be room for all of it.

Because maybe aging well isn’t about holding onto every version of yourself you’ve ever been.

Maybe it’s about remaining capable enough, curious enough, and healthy enough to keep discovering who you want to be next.

And apparently this version of me is perfectly happy sitting at Cape Disappointment watching the water.

At least until a really good wave shows up.

Then we’ll see. 😂

When I was a kid, summer lasted forever.

Seriously.

The last day of school arrived and there was this enormous stretch of life between June and September.

You didn’t measure it in weeks.

You measured it in bike rides and scraped knees and how long you could stay outside before somebody’s mother started yelling your name.

September might as well have been three years away.

Now?

I swear I put my shorts on in June and somebody starts selling pumpkins.

What the hell happened?

I’ve been thinking about this lately because the older I get, the faster time seems to move.

I’m 72 now.

A week can disappear before I feel like I’ve properly introduced myself to Monday.

Months are worse.

Peggy and I will be driving somewhere and one of us will say, “Wasn’t it just Christmas?”

Yep.

And apparently it’s August.

I know there’s some psychology behind this.

Part of it may simply be proportion. When you’re ten, one year is a tenth of your entire life. At 72, it’s a much smaller piece of the pie.

But I think there’s something else happening too.

We stop having as many firsts.

Think about childhood.

First bike.

First day at a new school.

First sleepover.

First time swimming in the ocean.

First crush.

First time you wandered farther from home than you were probably supposed to.

Sorry, Mom.

Everything was worth noticing because so much of it hadn’t happened before.

Then we grow up.

We create routines.

And routines are useful.

I like mine.

I teach classes. I work. Peggy and I eat pretty simply. We protect our weekends. We have places we love to walk and roads we enjoy driving.

I don’t need excitement every fifteen minutes to feel alive.

In fact, that sounds exhausting.

But routine has an interesting side effect.

Your brain gets very good at not paying attention.

You’ve driven this road before.

You’ve eaten this meal before.

You’ve walked this trail before.

You’ve watched another Tuesday become Wednesday.

Nothing unusual here.

Keep moving.

And suddenly it’s Christmas again.

Maybe that’s part of why those childhood summers felt so long.

We were there for them.

Not practicing mindfulness.

God help us, nobody told a ten-year-old in 1964 to practice mindfulness. 😂

We were just paying attention because the world was interesting.

I still get glimpses of that now.

Peggy and I take our weekend drives and walks pretty seriously.

Not serious like we’re training for something.

They’re our us time.

We’ll drive somewhere because we’ve never been down that road.

We’ll stop because there’s an eagle sitting in a tree.

We’ll walk out to the point in Ilwaco and discover two otters having dinner.

We’ll stand around watching pelicans surf.

Sometimes we’ll sit somewhere for twenty minutes and do absolutely nothing useful.

Those moments feel different.

They stick.

I can remember the otters.

I can remember the nine eagles we once saw.

I can remember sitting high above the ocean at Cape Disappointment with Peggy beside me.

And yet I couldn’t tell you much about some random Wednesday three weeks ago.

It disappeared.

That makes me wonder whether we’re asking the wrong question about time.

We say:

How do I slow down time?

We can’t.

The clock doesn’t care.

Sixty seconds is still sixty seconds whether you’re six or 72.

Maybe the better question is:

How much of my time am I actually noticing?

Because perhaps a life doesn’t feel long simply because it contains a lot of days.

Maybe it feels long because it contains a lot of moments we were actually there for.

That doesn’t mean we need bigger adventures.

I’m becoming less convinced that bigger is the answer to much of anything.

You don’t need to fly to Italy every month.

You don’t need a bucket list with 147 items.

You don’t need to turn your life into an Instagram reel.

Maybe you just need to occasionally interrupt the automatic part of your life.

Take the road you’ve never taken.

Walk somewhere different.

Sit outside for dinner.

Call someone you haven’t talked with lately.

Watch the damn sunset instead of photographing it.

Stop when you see the otters.

Do something that makes your brain say:

Huh. This is different.

Because different gets noticed.

And what gets noticed has a better chance of being remembered.

I’m not trying to make my remaining years pass more slowly.

I don’t think that’s possible.

But I would like to lose fewer of them to autopilot.

Maybe that’s one of the real challenges of getting older.

Not squeezing more into our lives.

Not chasing youth.

Not desperately collecting experiences because we’re afraid the clock is running.

Just being awake for the life that’s already happening.

Those childhood summers weren’t special because nothing ever ended.

They ended every year.

Maybe they felt endless because we hadn’t yet learned how to hurry through them.

Perhaps living well includes occasionally looking up from the clock.

And noticing that summer is still here.

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I teach movement six days a week.

I’ve spent years helping people get stronger, move better, regain balance, get back on the floor, and return to things they thought they’d lost.

I’ve watched people walk into RiversZen with canes and eventually leave without them.

I’ve watched shoulders move again.

I’ve watched people get back into their gardens, climb stairs, ride horses, travel, and simply feel comfortable inside their own bodies again.

So you don’t have to convince me that movement matters.

I believe movement can change your life.

I also know it isn’t enough.

That’s probably an odd thing for a movement teacher to say.

After all, this is what I do for a living.

But I learned that lesson the hard way.

At 53, I weighed nearly 270 pounds.

I had type 2 diabetes.

My body hurt.

I was facing surgeries on both feet, my knee, lower back, shoulder, and possibly my hip.

I was moving toward a future I didn’t want very quickly.

Movement became part of turning that around.

A huge part.

But so did something much less exciting.

I changed what I ate.

Not perfectly.

Not because I discovered some magical diet nobody else knew about.

I simply started paying attention to what I was putting into my body every day.

Eventually I lost 98 pounds.

My type 2 diabetes went into remission.

The surgeries I had been facing never happened.

And nineteen years later, I’m still here teaching movement six days a week.

For a long time, I wanted to turn that experience into a formula.

Maybe you’ve done this too.

We want to know which thing mattered most.

Was it the food?

The movement?

The weight loss?

The sleep?

The reduced stress?

Give me the percentages.

Tell me the secret.

Just tell me what to do.

I understand the appeal.

Life would be wonderfully convenient if health worked that way.

Do this one thing and everything else falls into place.

Unfortunately, bodies seem to have missed that memo.

The longer I’ve done this, the less interested I’ve become in finding the one thing.

Food matters enormously.

So does movement.

So does sleep.

So does stress.

So do the people you spend your life with.

So does getting outside.

So does having something that gets you out of bed in the morning.

And here’s the frustrating part.

They don’t live in separate little boxes.

Sleep poorly and you may not feel like moving.

Stop moving and your strength begins to disappear.

Eat in a way that leaves you feeling lousy and movement gets harder.

Live under constant stress and sleep can suffer.

Lose your sense of purpose and taking care of any of it can start feeling less important.

It’s a life.

That’s what I think we sometimes miss when we’re searching for the next health answer.

We turn health into a collection of individual problems to solve.

Need to lose weight?

Here’s a diet.

Back hurts?

Here’s an exercise.

Can’t sleep?

Here’s a supplement.

Low energy?

Here’s another supplement.

And before long you’ve got twelve different solutions sitting on the kitchen counter and you’re still wondering why you don’t feel very good.

Maybe you don’t need another solution.

Maybe it’s worth looking at the whole picture.

How are you eating?

How are you sleeping?

Are you moving your body?

Are you getting stronger or slowly becoming weaker?

Do you ever get outside?

Do you have people you enjoy being around?

Do you have something you’re looking forward to?

Not as a scorecard.

Good grief, we don’t need another way to fail at health. 😂

As a way to notice.

Where could your life use a little attention?

That’s a much different question than:

What’s the best diet?

Or:

What’s the best exercise?

Or:

What supplement should I take?

Sometimes one area really does need more attention than the others.

Nineteen years ago, food needed a lot more attention in my life.

At another point, learning how to move without hurting was enormous.

At 72, maintaining strength, mobility, balance, and the ability to keep doing the things Peggy and I love matters tremendously to me.

Next year?

We’ll see.

That’s the thing about taking care of a human being.

The assignment keeps changing.

I still teach movement six days a week.

I still believe 30 or 45 minutes of the right movement a few times a week can dramatically change what your later years look like.

But I’m never going to tell you movement is everything.

Neither is food.

Neither is sleep.

Neither is fasting, yoga, strength training, supplements, cold plunges, or whatever we’re all supposed to be doing before breakfast this week. 😂

You don’t need to find the one thing.

Start by noticing the life you’re already living.

Then ask yourself a simple question:

What part of it could use a little more care right now?

Start there.

You can worry about the percentages later.

Or better yet...

Don’t.

When I was a kid, you went to the doctor when something was wrong.

You broke your arm.

You needed stitches.

You had a fever that wouldn’t quit.

Otherwise, you pretty much went about the business of living your life.

My parents didn’t have a cardiologist, an endocrinologist, a dermatologist and a collection of specialists whose names required their own address book.

They had a family doctor.

They knew his name.

They saw him when they needed him.

That was normal.

Today I teach people mostly in their sixties and seventies, and sometimes I listen to them talk before class.

One has a dermatologist appointment.

Another just saw the cardiologist.

Someone has bloodwork tomorrow.

Someone else is waiting for imaging.

Then there’s the follow-up appointment for the appointment they had last week.

I’m not making fun of them.

These are people I care about.

But sometimes I stand there listening and think:

When did being responsible for your health start requiring this many appointments?

I don’t have a simple answer.

And I’m becoming increasingly suspicious of simple answers anyway.

Healthcare has changed enormously since my parents were young.

We can detect things we couldn’t detect then.

We can treat things that once killed people.

We have screenings that can find serious problems before someone feels sick.

That’s progress.

I’m grateful for it.

Especially now.

When Peggy was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma this year, we weren’t interested in romantic stories about how much better everything was fifty years ago.

She had cancer.

She needed help.

Modern medicine had something to offer her, and thank God it did.

Her tumor responded remarkably quickly to chemotherapy. She continued teaching throughout treatment and handled it extraordinarily well.

I’ve thought about that experience a lot.

Because it helped me understand a distinction I’ve probably been circling around for years.

There’s a difference between having access to medicine and building your life around medicine.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I don’t want to go backward.

I don’t want the medicine my parents had.

I want the medicine we have today.

I just don’t necessarily want medicine occupying more and more of my life when I’m well.

And that’s where I think there’s a conversation worth having.

When did more monitoring automatically become better health?

When did another test automatically become responsible?

When did not having an appointment on the calendar start feeling almost negligent?

I don’t know.

But I do know something from nearly twenty years of working with people.

Most health is built between appointments.

Your doctor can tell you your blood pressure.

They can’t take your walk.

A blood test can tell you something about what’s happening inside your body.

It can’t decide what you eat tonight.

A bone-density scan can identify a problem.

It can’t make your muscles stronger.

Your cardiologist can give you valuable information about your heart.

They can’t put you to bed tonight.

None of this makes the doctor, test, scan or treatment unimportant.

It puts them in perspective.

They’re tools.

Sometimes incredibly important tools.

But they’re not your health.

You are living that part every day.

Peggy didn’t know cancer was coming.

For seventeen years before it arrived, she moved her body. She taught classes. She ate real food. She slept. She managed stress. She kept showing up.

Did those things prevent cancer?

Obviously not.

Did they make her chemotherapy destroy the tumor?

I can’t tell you that.

But do I believe those seventeen years helped build the strength and resilience she carried into treatment?

Absolutely.

She didn’t start building herself when she got the diagnosis.

She brought seventeen years with her.

That’s the relationship with medicine I want.

Build health while you’re well.

Use medicine when you need it.

And be grateful it’s there.

That doesn’t tell you how many doctors you should have.

Maybe you need seven.

Maybe you need one.

Maybe you’re going through a season of life where it seems like every Tuesday comes with another waiting room and a clipboard.

That’s between you and the people helping care for you.

I’m not asking you to cancel an appointment.

I’m asking something much more interesting.

Is all this healthcare helping me build health?

Because those two things can overlap.

But they’re not automatically the same thing.

Maybe an appointment catches something important.

Wonderful.

Maybe a medication gives you the stability you need to start making other changes.

Wonderful.

Maybe physical therapy gets you moving again.

Wonderful.

And maybe there’s also something you’ve slowly handed over to the medical system that still belongs to you.

Your movement.

Your food.

Your sleep.

Your strength.

Your relationships.

Your time outside.

Your willingness to pay attention to your own body.

That’s the part I don’t want us to forget.

My parents’ generation certainly didn’t have everything figured out.

Neither does ours.

Maybe the goal isn’t to return to the way they lived.

Maybe it’s to keep the best of what we’ve gained without surrendering something valuable along the way.

Medicine when we need medicine.

And ownership of our health every day in between.

Your doctor’s office can be part of a healthy life.

It just doesn’t have to be the center of one.

I drove through town recently and started noticing buildings.

Three places that used to be something else are now urgent care clinics.

The old car dealership is a specialty practice.

Another lot is being turned into medical offices.

The hospital has expanded.

This is a small town.

And healthcare seems to be physically growing all around us.

I’m not complaining about that. People need doctors. They need hospitals. Sometimes they need really sophisticated medicine.

Believe me, our family learned that lesson this year.

But once I started noticing the buildings, I started noticing something else.

The calendars.

I teach movement classes six days a week. Many of our students are in their sixties and seventies, and some of their schedules make mine look relaxing.

Dermatologist Tuesday.

Cardiologist Thursday.

Bloodwork before the next appointment.

Imaging after that.

Follow-up with the specialist.

Then another specialist the first specialist referred them to.

They come to class with little bandages on their arms and faces from procedures.

They compare specialists the way people used to compare restaurants.

And sometimes I listen to all of this and think:

When did staying healthy become a part-time job?

I don’t mean that sarcastically.

These are smart, responsible people.

They’re doing what they’ve been told responsible people do.

Get the test.

Keep the appointment.

Watch the numbers.

Take the medication.

Schedule the follow-up.

There can be very good reasons for every one of those things.

But I’ve started wondering whether we’ve blurred two words that aren’t quite the same.

Healthcare.

And health.

Healthcare is what happens when you get the mammogram, see the cardiologist, have the bloodwork, fill the prescription, or get the treatment.

Sometimes healthcare saves your life.

Health is something else.

Health is what you’re building during all those ordinary hours when nobody in a white coat is watching.

And Peggy reminded me just how important that distinction can be.

This year she was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Suddenly, this wasn’t a philosophical conversation about healthcare anymore.

She had cancer.

She needed medicine.

And we were incredibly grateful it was there.

She chose chemotherapy. Her tumor responded remarkably quickly. She continued teaching throughout treatment and handled the experience so well that her oncologist was surprised.

I wasn’t.

Not because I knew what chemotherapy would do to the cancer. I didn’t.

And I’m certainly not going to tell you that seventeen years of healthy living made the chemotherapy destroy her tumor. I can’t know that.

But do I believe those seventeen years mattered enormously to the woman who walked into treatment?

Absolutely.

Peggy didn’t start taking care of herself when the diagnosis arrived.

For seventeen years she’d been moving her body.

Teaching.

Eating real food.

Sleeping.

Managing stress.

Showing up.

Day after ordinary day.

She wasn’t preparing for cancer.

She was living.

And when something we never expected came knocking at the door, she didn’t have to start building strength.

She brought it with her.

I’ve always talked about building your body like a fortress.

Not because a fortress guarantees nothing bad will ever happen.

Clearly it doesn’t.

Bad things happen to healthy people too.

The point of building the fortress is having something there when the storm arrives.

Medicine treated Peggy’s cancer.

But seventeen years of healthy living helped build the woman who went through that treatment.

I think both things matter.

That’s also why I don’t want this conversation to become doctors versus lifestyle.

That’s silly.

If you need the cardiologist, go to the cardiologist.

If you need the scan, get the scan.

If you need medicine, use medicine.

And if someday you’re sitting across from an oncologist hearing the word cancer, you’ll be very glad brilliant people spent their lives figuring out what to do next.

We certainly were.

But don’t confuse receiving healthcare with building health.

Nobody can do that second part for you.

Your doctor can’t take your walk.

Your cardiologist can’t get you off the couch.

Your pharmacist can’t choose your dinner.

Your physical therapist can’t make you move on the other six days of the week.

Your sleep doesn’t come in a prescription bottle.

Neither does time outside.

Neither does laughter.

Neither does having people in your life you actually enjoy being around.

And perhaps that’s what bothers me when I watch more medical buildings going up while listening to people describe calendars filled with appointments.

We’ve become extraordinarily good at managing health problems.

I’m not sure we’ve become equally good at helping people build health.

Those aren’t the same thing.

I’m 72. Nineteen years ago I was 98 pounds heavier and dealing with type 2 diabetes. Changing how I ate and how I moved changed the direction of my life.

That didn’t make me bulletproof.

Peggy’s experience reminded me that none of us are.

It did teach me something else.

The ordinary Tuesday matters.

The walk nobody applauds.

The simple meal nobody photographs.

The class you almost skipped.

Going to bed.

Getting outside.

Moving your body when nothing hurts and nobody has frightened you with a diagnosis yet.

Those little decisions can seem almost laughably insignificant.

Until the day they aren’t.

So yes.

Go to the appointment when you need the appointment.

Get the test.

Use the medicine.

Thank God for the people who know what to do when something goes seriously wrong.

Then go home and remember something equally important.

Healthcare is there when you need help.

Health is something you’re building every day.

Most of that work will never happen in a medical building.

It happens where it always has.

In the life you live between appointments.

Quiet Isn't the Problem

“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”

Henry David Thoreau wrote that in Walden more than 170 years ago.

I’ve heard that line most of my life.

And lately I’ve been thinking about it differently.

At first, “quiet desperation” sounds like a warning against a quiet life.

That bothered me.

Because I live a pretty quiet life.

Peggy and I aren’t desperately searching for the next adventure. We’re not trying to fill every weekend or work our way through some giant bucket list before time runs out.

We teach our classes.

We take walks.

We go for drives.

We watch birds.

We spend time together.

We live in a beautiful little corner of the world where you can see an eagle sitting on top of a pine tree looking for breakfast, drive across the Columbia River a few minutes later, and somehow still be impressed by the whole thing even though you’ve done it hundreds of times.

That’s a pretty good morning around here.

And I’ve never thought of any of it as desperation.

Then it hit me.

Quiet isn’t the problem.

Desperation is.

Thoreau wasn’t condemning people for living quietly. In the very next sentence he talks about resignation.

That’s different.

You can live a simple, quiet life and be completely engaged with it.

And you can live an incredibly busy life while quietly wishing you were somewhere else.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

How many people aren’t really unhappy enough to change anything?

They get up.

Go to work.

Pay the bills.

Make dinner.

Watch television.

Go to bed.

Do it again tomorrow.

Ask them how they’re doing and they’ll probably say the same thing most of us say.

“Fine.”

And they are fine.

Sort of.

Nothing is terribly wrong.

But somewhere along the way, pieces of their life started disappearing.

They stopped doing something they loved because it became a little harder.

They stopped calling somebody.

Stopped going somewhere.

Stopped learning.

Stopped laughing as much.

Stopped noticing things.

Maybe their body became less capable, so their world slowly became smaller with it.

Nothing dramatic happened.

There was no announcement.

They just quietly stopped participating.

I think that’s the desperation Thoreau was talking about.

Not sadness.

Not failure.

Resignation.

The belief that this is just how things are now.

Especially as we get older.

I’ve heard versions of it for years.

“My knees are shot.”

“My balance isn’t what it used to be.”

“I can’t do that anymore.”

“That’s what happens when you get old.”

And sometimes there are real limitations. I’m not pretending otherwise.

But I’ve also watched people accept limitations long before their bodies required them to.

That’s a very different thing.

I’ve spent almost twenty years working with people who thought some part of their life was over.

Then one day they got back on the floor.

Walked up the hill.

Worked in the garden.

Got back on the horse.

Sometimes the victory looks ridiculously small from the outside.

It isn’t.

Because what they really got back wasn’t flexibility or strength.

They got back a piece of their life.

And maybe that’s what living well is really about.

Not constantly searching for more.

Not trying to make every day extraordinary.

Not turning life into another self-improvement project.

Just being there for it.

I don’t need a bigger life.

I rather like this one.

A walk with Peggy can be enough.

An eagle in a tree can be enough.

A room full of people laughing while we’re supposed to be exercising can definitely be enough.

You don’t have to live loudly to live fully.

But you do have to participate.

A full life isn’t measured by how much you can fit into it.

It’s measured by how much of it you’re actually there for.

If this gave you something to think about, the member section is where we put it into practice.

Each Sunday, we’ll take the idea we’ve been exploring and turn it into something simple you can actually try in your own life.

No giant checklist. No homework assignment that makes you wish you’d stayed a free subscriber. 😂

Just a little help turning “Hmmm, that’s worth thinking about” into “What might that look like in my life?”

Join us if you’d like to keep going.

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When I decided to change the way I ate, I could have started looking for replacements.

Diet soda instead of soda.

Sugar-free desserts instead of desserts.

Low-carb versions of the foods I was trying to stop eating.

Something sweet without the sugar.

Something crunchy without the carbs.

Something that tasted exactly like the old thing without doing what the old thing did.

That’s pretty much how we’re taught to change.

Don’t change what you want.

Find a substitute.

I think we make this much harder than it needs to be.

Nineteen years ago, I was 53 years old, 98 pounds heavier than I am today, and dealing with type 2 diabetes.

I didn’t need a better version of the food that helped get me there.

I needed to change what I ate.

So I did.

Not overnight. Not perfectly. And certainly not because I possessed some superhuman willpower.

My eating changed.

Then something interesting happened.

What I wanted changed too.

That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.

We act as if our tastes are permanent.

“I could never give up soda.”

“I have to have something sweet after dinner.”

“I can’t drink that without sweetener.”

Maybe.

Or maybe you’ve simply practiced wanting it for a very long time.

We forget that works both ways.

Practice eating differently long enough and your idea of what tastes good can change.

I don’t spend my days longing for the foods I used to eat.

I’m not sitting over a steak thinking, Boy, if only somebody could turn this thing into a donut. 😂

I like the way I eat.

That matters because living healthy gets a whole lot easier when you stop feeling like you’re constantly sacrificing something.

A recent review from researchers at Tufts gives us another reason to question our obsession with substitutes.

They looked at 21 randomized clinical trials involving non-nutritive sweeteners. Compared with water or placebo, the researchers found concerning signals involving fasting insulin, HbA1c, and insulin sensitivity.

That doesn’t mean one packet of sweetener is going to ruin your health.

It doesn’t mean sugar is suddenly good for you either.

It means the clever replacement may not always be as clever as we thought.

And I think there’s a bigger lesson hiding there.

We spend enormous amounts of time trying to engineer our way around changing our habits.

The food industry is happy to help.

Take almost anything you’ve decided not to eat and somebody will sell you a version with a different label.

Sugar-free.

Low-fat.

Low-carb.

Keto.

High-protein.

Zero-calorie.

Sometimes those products can be useful.

But before you go hunting for the replacement, there’s another possibility worth considering.

Maybe you don’t need one.

You can learn to drink water.

You can learn that every meal doesn’t have to end with something sweet.

You can discover that hunger isn’t an emergency.

You can eat simple food and actually enjoy it.

And given enough time, the thing you once believed you could never live without may become something you rarely think about.

That’s what happened to me.

I didn’t spend nineteen years winning a daily battle against food.

That sounds exhausting.

I changed what I practiced until eventually it stopped feeling like a battle.

So if you’re trying to change something about the way you eat, don’t automatically ask:

What can I replace this with?

Every once in a while, try a different answer.

Nothing.

You might be surprised how little you miss it.

I recorded this on the drive today after a memory popped into my head about quitting cigarettes in my twenties.

I wasn’t planning to talk about smoking. I was thinking about that strange point when something you’ve struggled with for years suddenly loses its grip.

Anyway, here’s where my brain went with it.