5 Daily Habits for Every Healthy Family #5

Everyone wants their family to be healthy.  Often that means making lifestyle changes and forming habits that promote overall health. Once you’ve decided to commit to a change, where do you start? The good news is that there are a handful of healthy habits that any family can adapt and grow with.

Here is Daily Habit #5: Trust in Your Healthy Design

Your Family is Designed to Be Healthy!

The healthiest families I know are ones that understand and trust that each of us was designed to heal and be healthy. What does that mean? When we cut our finger, the cut heals, without any outside intervention. Anything we can do to facilitate that healing potential will lead to increased health. Our instantly gratified society demands answers fast, but sometimes the simple answer is that time is required to heal and be healthy. 

What does a habit of trusting your healing potential look like? In one word: restraint. Often, we feel the need to “do” something in a situation when our health is being tested or in any situation when we are challenged. Letting go of control is possibly the most difficult thing to do in our success driven society. Even more than letting go of control, we need to wrap out heads around the fact that we never had it. Life is a gift and with that gift comes our ability to be healthy provided there is no interference to our innate potential. Our life and health are so intimately intertwined that we need to approach any health intervention with great delicacy. It is our human nature to want to help, to intervene. 

However, I would argue that many of the health care interventions that are considered commonplace today are actually going against our healthy design. One of the best examples I can give is using fever reducing medication. When our body becomes under attack from a virus, bacteria or other foreign toxin, the body intelligently raises our temperature to stimulate our immune system to fight off the invader. When we intervene with fever reducing medication, we are fighting our body’s own defenses, which will actually prolong the illness. Letting the fever run its course allows our body to defend itself and heal. It takes trust and patience, but it works. We’re designed that way.

My Son and I Enjoy A Healthy Meal Together

Just to use a personal example of trusting the healthy design of the body, I would like to use my son, who is approaching two and a half years. He has not been artificially immunized through vaccination. He has never taken an antibiotic or any medication. He regularly gets licked in the face by our two dogs. He crawled all over our UN-bleached floor. He regularly eats things off the floor and/or restaurant table. He still breastfeeds on a daily basis. We co-sleep.  He likes to have his spine checked on daddy’s adjusting table (but only occasionally gets more than a tickle adjustment).

He has had two fevers and one illness (rotavirus) to date. Both fevers were due to his teeth coming in, which makes perfect sense: open holes appearing in his mouth could very well lead to infection, so the body alerts the immune system with a fever so it’s prepared. His rotavirus experience, while not pretty (vomit and diarrhea never is), lasted only about 36 hours. How did we treat it? With lots of fluids and breast milk. He has never had an ear infection, doesn’t have allergies or digestive issues, and sleeps like a teenager. 

While trusting in the healthy design takes practice and patience, it is very rewarding when you see your family’s health thrive because of it. We are all designed to be healthy. We just have to believe that and act accordingly.

Choosing to have a healthy family is a great resolution. Making small changes into healthy habits is the best way to see lasting improvement in your family’s overall health. Check in next month for 5 Questions Healthy Parents are Asking.

Dr. Dan Turo is the owner and chiropractor of Turo Family Chiropractic located in the North Hills of Pittsburgh, PA. Follow him on facebook and twitter.