People sometimes ask me what makes Experience Life so special, particularly in a field of health, fitness and lifestyle magazines that tend to look and feel a lot a like. It’s hard to know where to start, because frankly, it’s a bunch of things.

I talk about some of them in the video above (from my May, 2014 cover shoot and profile), and I recently stumbled across this mighty list I wrote up a while back, titled “20 Things That Makes Experience Life Different,” that offers even more reasons:

1. We are a thinking person’s health and fitness magazine. Smart, inquisitive, well-researched, practical, in-depth. We know our three million readers are well-educated, successful, busy women and men (65/35; median age 41), so we never waste their time or insult their intelligence with fluff and dumbed-down nonsense.

2. We’re for real. No gimmicks, no hype. We’re the most authentic, practical, relevant magazine in our category. We’re also the most unique — totally unlike any other health-focused publication on newsstands today.

3. We see health in a whole-person, whole-life context. Not just diet and exercise, but emotional, mental, social and spiritual wellbeing. If it affects health, happiness and quality of life, we cover it.

4. We are on the leading edge. We strongly appeal to the trend-setting Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability (LOHAS) market segment, a $200+ billion U.S. marketplace for goods and services focused on health and fitness, sustainable living, personal development, and social justice. Our audience actually skews more health-dedicated, better educated and more affluent that the typical LOHAS consumer.

5. We understand the challenges people face in getting and staying healthy. We known they are struggling with time limitations, stress, misinformation, missing skills, lack of consistent motivation and support, and the influences of an unhealthy culture — and we address all those obstacles head-on.

6. We go deep. We push beyond the typical blurbs, superficial tips and sound bites to cover complex health issues, emerging research, sensitive topics and the finer points of important stories that many other magazines ignore or gloss over.

7. We believe in whole, clean, natural foods. We help our readers understand their value, and discover the best ways to enjoy them. We tell the truth about ingredients and chemical additives we think are bad news, and we don’t pander to processed-food advertisers. We’re less focused on fat, carbs, grams and calories than on optimal nutrition and wellbeing.

8. We meet our readers where they are. Whether they are just starting out on their healthy-living journey or deeply invested in hardcore fitness pursuits, we evolve with them as they develop their healthy passions and practices.

9. Our readers don’t just “just flip through” our pages — they read.

• A third of our readers spend more than an hour with each issue (average time: 48 minutes), and many say they devour each issue cover-to-cover.
• More than half say Experience Life is among their favorite magazines. Almost 70 percent share each issue with others.
• 83 percent say they took some action in the past year as a result of reading the magazine.

10. We have earned our readers’ trust and engagement. Since 2001, our discerning readers have counted on us for their health wisdom, and appreciated our points of difference. Here’s a sample of some recent comments:

“With all the so-called health magazines out there, I believe that your magazine is one of the few truly authentic ones.”

“This magazine is absolutely phenomenal. In fact, it may be the single best publication I have ever read. Each element of wellbeing, from meditation to exercise, is addressed in a thoughtful, balanced way.”

“Thank you for being a unique publication that provides many ideas to improve one’s wellbeing. It’s not just a magazine, it’s a guide to living a good life!”

11. We’ve got a serious commitment to quality, accuracy and scientific rigor. We read whole studies (not just headlines and abstracts), we question conclusions, and go directly to the scientific experts for insight. The country’s most forward thinking and best-respected doctors think we are getting it right:

“Experience Life magazine offers practical insights into the major health challenges that all Americans face. The writing is compelling and the message has impact. Reading the magazine is time well spent.”
—Mehmet Oz, MD, cardiothoracic surgeon, host of the Dr. Oz show, best-selling author of the YOU series and Oprah regular.

“Experience Life delivers practical knowledge at the leading edge of health, nutrition and medicine in ways that inform and delight. If you want to read the best magazine in health and wellness today, read Experience Life.”
—Mark Hyman, MD, functional medicine pioneer and New York Times bestselling author of UltraMetabolism and The UltraMind Solution

“I am continually impressed with the quality of Experience Life’s integrative health coverage, and their authentic passion for changing their readers’ lives. There is no smarter, better health and fitness magazine out there today.”
—Frank Lipman, MD, sustainable wellness advocate and author of Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again.

12. We’ve got our feet on the ground. We don’t idolize supermodels or obsess about uber-celebrities who are living lifestyles of the rich and famous. We prefer to focus on accomplished, admirable, interesting people with whom we and our readers have more in common — folks who share our values and inspire our readers to think bigger about what a healthy way of life is all about.

13. We’re not afraid to be out ahead. We regularly (and accurately) cover important health issues years before our competitive set, and break important stories before they hit conventional news outlets. We were 10 years ahead of most media in reporting the scientific reality of saturated fats and the non-danger of dietary cholesterol. We covered the microbiome before Michael Pollan did. Positive psychology, mindfulness, detox, interval training, Paleo? We’ve been all over that for many, many years.

14. We’re well-researched. Our writers and editors go in search of solid studies and informed experts to make sure they understand (and can stand behind) every angle and assertion in our articles. We hire actual fact-checkers to double-fact-check every article.

15. We’re out to change lives for the better. Our intent is clear and focused, and its something you can feel the moment you pick up the magazine. Readers often write us love letters on the basis of our mission-driven difference.

16. We’re a feel-good experience. We don’t preach at our readers, shame them or “should” them. We don’t cultivate their insecurities. We invite them to think about their highest choices, their most positive vision, and we support them in achieving the goals that matter to them.

17. We’re tireless. We’ve been making this magazine for more than 14 years, and we feel like we’re just getting started. No broken-record messages or same-old stories here. Every issue is a fresh discovery, and part of an ongoing, dynamic conversation with our readers.

18. We won’t ever sell out. Our readers’ wellbeing and success is what matters most to us. Our editorial pages are not for sale — which is why our ad pages get the serious consideration, attention and respect they do. We don’t take ads for pharmaceuticals, plastic surgery, diet aids or sodas. But we love championing the brands and products we feel deserve real kudos.

19. We’re the only healthy-living title most of our busy audience ever reads. Our reader research demonstrates that our busy audience is almost entirely non-duplicated. They read virtually no other magazines on a regular basis. They get everything in one place — healthy-eating and cooking, exercise and active adventure, plus advice on stress management, life balance, happiness and more — so, why look elsewhere? If you want to reach our audience, you’re probably not going to reach them via another publication.

20. We’re more than a magazine. We’re a multimedia, multiplatform phenomenon. We leave millions of positive impressions and create community through our dynamic, mobile-friendly Web content and app-based digital edition, plus blogs, audio, video, social media, e-newsletters (with an enviable 24% open rate!), mobile apps, learning programs and destination experiences. We even have our own manifesto (authored by yours truly). You can get the downloadable PDF booklet of that manifesto in exchange for your email at my home page).

So, there you go! Visit ExperienceLife.com and RevolutionaryAct.com to learn more. And please let me know if you’ve got any reasons I missed!

Back in my mid-20s, when I was struggling mightily to get healthy, I had an important and painful realization: I was missing some important skill sets.

I kept running into problems following whole-food eating plans because they required me to shop, menu-plan, and cook in ways I didn’t feel confident about. I wasn’t clear on what a “balanced” diet was. I wasn’t sure what to do with kale or kohlrabi. I didn’t know much about macro or micronutrients. And I knew even less about things like satiety, glycemic load, and the microbiome.

I ran into problems with exercise programs, too, because I didn’t understand the language of sets and reps. I didn’t have the first clue what “proper form” was. I didn’t get the concepts of interval and heart-rate training, much less how to do them properly. I was terrified to attend a yoga class because I felt I didn’t know how to do it.

And when it came to rebooting my daily patterns — my schedule, my habits, my wake–sleep and energy cycles, all the random little tasks and competencies required to facilitate healthy living — I got overwhelmed.

I didn’t really know where to start, or how to overcome my own inertia and fear of change. I didn’t understand how to assess my mindset or recognize my own unhealthy thought patterns and beliefs, and I knew even less about how to shift and evolve them.

I just wanted it all to be easier.  For a long time, I kept wishing I could just go live with a healthy person and see how all this healthy-living stuff was done.

In reality, though, I realized that was probably not going to happen anytime soon. I got bored with my own excuses and realized my frustrated, defeated, “but-I-don’t-know-how” stance was radically limiting my ability to make the changes I wanted to make. So I gave myself a little pep talk.

I had made it through a pretty rigorous college education, I told myself, and in my lifetime, I’d managed to learn to do all kinds of things I had once been clueless about, like riding a bicycle and operating a computer. Reality: In every single case that I’d successfully learned something useful, I’d had to start from a place of not knowing how.

It was no different with healthy living, I decided. I just had to start where I was, and put the focus on getting better, smarter, more masterful with time. I could learn how to work with whole foods and how to eat consciously. I could learn how to exercise intelligently and enjoyably.

I could learn how to manage my time, energy, and priorities. I could learn how to navigate my own emotions and mindsets more skillfully.

And little by little, I did. The more I learned, the easier things got. The easier things got, the more energy and momentum I had to keep learning.

The hardest part, really, was just admitting that I didn’t know a bunch of stuff I really needed to know. The next hardest part was deciding not to beat myself up or wallow in shame and self-pity about that.

The actual learning part? That turned out to be pretty fun.

I took it on like I’d approached my academic studies. I read books, I looked stuff up, I asked people who knew more than I did, I tried things out as “assignments,” and I practiced what I’d learned.

I also experimented with lots of things until I found what I liked and what worked for me.

Of course, I couldn’t learn everything at once. My strategy was to start with my four biggest pain points:

1. A lack of whole-food and cooking knowledge 

2. A fear of feeling and looking stupid while exercising

3. Self-destructive, unconscious eating patterns 

4. A tendency to seek refuge from anxiety and emotional discomfort by watching television

To tackle the first challenge, I decided that I would check out some healthy cookbooks from the library and start with just three recipes that looked appealing. I would then look up anything I had to know in order to complete the instructions for those recipes.

This meant that if a recipe said “sauté shrimp” and I wasn’t sure how to do that properly, I would look up every step I didn’t know (from peeling and deveining the shrimp to deglazing the pan) until I could figure it out.

It was a slow process. At the time, I couldn’t afford cooking lessons, and online cooking videos were still a rarity. So I asked my mom and food-smart friends for pointers, and gradually, I started getting the hang of it.

Same thing with exercise. I screwed up my courage, got myself to a couple of beginning group fitness and yoga classes. I quickly learned enough to exercise effectively without hurting myself. Nobody made fun of me, and once I got over my fear of looking stupid, I rapidly got stronger. I started authentically enjoying the experience of moving my body.

My other challenges were more nuanced and complex. But as I read up on them, and did the work of experimenting with various self-observation and consciousness-shifting strategies, I discovered a rich trove of mindfulness practices that really helped.

As I journaled about my experi-ments (both successes and apparent failures), I discovered aspects of my personality I’d been previously unaware of. I developed new compassion and respect for myself, and gradually, I was able to approach eating, exercising, and stress management from a radically different — and much more empowered — place.

Admittedly, none of these were quick fixes. But they were utterly transformative and deeply satisfying, and every time I learned a new skill or had a big “aha” insight, it gave me new fuel to keep going.

Everybody’s journey with healthy living is different, but if you’ve been struggling to shift your life in healthier directions, the single greatest healthy-living skill I’d recommend building is this: Learn to switch from a fixed (or “judger”) mindset to a growth (or “learner”) mindset. (See the Revolutionary Reading below for more on how to do that.)

Once you get your head right about “not knowing” whatever it is you wished you knew, and you begin to take a curious (versus angst-ridden) approach to your learning process, you’ll find it much easier and more rewarding to learn anything you desire.

Whether it’s whole-food fundamentals and body-movement basics or personal-development and mindfulness essentials, the sooner you start building your healthy skill sets, the sooner being healthy will become not just easier, but far more fun and rewarding, too.

Our “101 Revolutionary Ways to Be Healthy” app is a great start, because it gives you a “Revolutionary Act of the Day” for daily inspiration, plus links to articles and other resources that let you get smarter and more skillful at your own pace. And we’ll be delivering an upgraded and expanded version soon!

Meanwhile, pick one area where you feel stymied and start learning there. As your skills expand, so will your sense of possibility.

Many years ago, I took a Signature Strengths test (you can take one yourself for free at www.viacharacter.org) and found out that my No. 1 strength was “love of learning.”

The description read like this: “You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums — anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.”

Well, the survey certainly got that one right. The fact that I was cruising around taking online assessments was probably one indication that I am, indeed, forever looking to discover new things — about myself, about life, and about whatever happens to interest me at the time.

And what interests me at any given time can be a pretty diverse set of subjects. That’s one of the things I love about Experience Life: A whole lot fits within our wide-ranging editorial frame.

We have three primary and rather generously defined “verticals”:

• Health, nutrition, progressive medicine, and general well-being
• Fitness, exercise, activity, active adventure, and body confidence
• Quality of life, including just about everything else that goes into creating a more satisfying, skilled, conscious, and meaningful existence

So, basically, we cover pretty much anything that might help you enjoy a healthier, happier, more rewarding life — relationships, time management, mindfulness, media influences, the environment, sociocultural trends, and more.

Another thing I love about Experience Life is that we strive to cover topics of relevance to both women and men, and to people of all ages and all levels of experience within the health-seeking realm.

We focus more on a psychographic (health-motivated, intelligent, self-optimizing, purpose-centered) than we do on any one demographic (age, gender, etc.). Because the truth is, what helps most people get and stay healthy doesn’t actually vary all that much from gender to gender, or age to age (see “The Big Picture: 5 Fundamentals of Lifetime Health“).

Yes, of course, there are some differences. The fitness routine you have at age 80 is bound to be a bit different than the one you had at 20, but perhaps not necessarily as different as you might assume (see “Forever Fit“).

I would say that about 90 percent of the most essential stuff we need to do remains the same throughout our lifetimes:

• Eat whole, healthy foods, and avoid the eating habits that break down your body (for more on that, see “Food Habits that Age You” and “The Care and Feeding of a Healthy Brain“).
• Move and challenge your body in fun and functional ways (see “All Ages Strength Training“).
• Get enough rest, and respect your body’s natural rhythms.
• Proactively monitor and manage your stress.
• Connect meaningfully with other people, including healthy tribes and supportive communities.
• Safeguard your conscious, positive mindset (page “What’s in a Number?” and “Counterclockwise“).
• Avoid toxic environments, attitudes, and experiences.
• Address the root causes of your physical symptoms — and so on.
• How handy that the skills and knowledge we humans most need in order to thrive are surprisingly universal, and also evergreen.

Which brings me back to the emphasis of this month’s issue, which is about the value of taking a lifetime approach to healthy living.

That means building skills now that pay off immediately and will serve you well forever (the subject of my “Revolutionary Acts” column). It means taking what you discover over time — about yourself, life, the world at large — and progressively integrating it so that you get better, smarter, healthier, and happier with age and experience (for examples of that, see our amazing photo-essay feature “In Their Prime“).

The great thing is, each of us can leverage whatever signature strengths we have to integrate the skills that matter to us. So, whether you’re 17 or 70, I hope this issue of Experience Life holds something of interest, and that it inspires you to keep on learning and sharing the stuff that makes the biggest difference for you.

Too often, when we set out to establish an ideal-body vision for ourselves, we wind up with an image of somebody else’s body in our mental viewfinder.

It may not even be one particular body we’re fixating on. Just as likely, we assemble a mental montage of all the admirable physical features we’ve seen wandering around, and say: That. That’s what I want to look like. 

We’re constantly judging our own body against an ideal that may bear little or no relationship to our own physical reality, much less our larger life goals and priorities.

For many women, it’s about chasing the images we’ve seen presented in magazines and on TV, or that we were confronted with as girls during our Barbie doll years: leggy, slender frames on which a flat abdomen, tiny waist, and whole array of other precisely shaped features have been arranged just so.

But men aren’t immune, either. They may be chasing the shredded physiques of fitness models and movie stars, NFL football players, or even the injection-molded bodies of their action-figure heroes.

Ostensibly, this body idolatry is supposed to inspire us, motivate us, connect us to our own higher goals. But more often, it produces a sort of low-grade, demotivating misery that can persist for decades, even entire lifetimes.

And the really sad part is, far from serving as any practical aspirational fodder, our “I-want-THAT-body” obsessions often work directly against our respect and appreciation for the very real bodies in our possession.

The challenge is, by the time we are adults, most of us have been consciously or unconsciously hating on our own bodies for a very long time. Our neurological wiring has been formed around a powerful negative feedback loop:

Look outside for desirable body models; look in the mirror and find something to dislike or loathe; feel a surge of shame, anger, grief, or hopelessness; disconnect from self; treat self poorly and feel more miserable and alienated in own body; look outside for desirable body models; and so on.

My own “compare the bodies” game started in grade school. I was a pretty healthy, fit kid, but I was also kind of small for my age, and I was a late bloomer. When other girls started developing and looking like young women, I felt left behind, inadequate, stunted, and self-conscious.

So at some point, I started asking the question that too many of us never stop asking: Why can’t I look like that?

The funny thing is, even people who appear to have the body type considered “ideal” by society at any given time — people who were graced with certain proportions, or who have worked very hard to achieve them (sometimes by surgical or self-destructive means) — are quite likely to suffer from this same tendency.

Being happy with the body we have just isn’t something we’re taught how to do. Think about it: How many of us learned from our parents and other adult role models to say kind things about our own bodies? And the media environment we live in today only makes it harder.

I canvassed a few of my friends last week, asking them, “Do you remember when you started comparing your body with other people’s bodies?” Most of them (women and men alike) named an age between 7 and 10.

So it makes perfect sense that by the time we reach maturity, we’re adept and automatic in our assessments of the body parts we like, dislike, desire, admire, envy, or wish we could trade away. It’s an ingrained, and often only semiconscious, frame of mind.

I could say a lot about this — both from personal experience and from sociological observation and journalistic study. But since there’s another Revolutionary Act — No. 59: “Get Past Body Envy” — that addresses parts of this dynamic (and its antidotes) in more depth, I’ll focus here on the essential message of Revolutionary Act No. 15: “Raise Your Sights,” which is about establishing an inspiring, achievable vision not just for your own best body, but for your own best life.

To that end, I think it helps to grok three important truths.

1. Genes dictate a lot about your skeletal frame and general proportions. Your bones are your bones. They are never going to be Angelina Jolie’s bones or Brad Pitt’s bones. This is a good thing. Decide to love the body you are in. It’s the perfect body for you in this lifetime, and both its present and future state ride on your willingness to love and respect it precisely as it is, even as you strive to make it better. Which brings us to truth No. 2 . . .

2. Your level of health and fitness is largely up to you. Yes, a serious illness, trauma, or infirmity can present real limitations, but even within those limitations, virtually any body can be radically transformed by an optimal nutrition, exercise, and lifestyle program — for as long as you’re willing (or able) to pursue that program. Which brings us to truth No. 3 . . .

3. Ultimately, your body reflects your life: those habits, practices, patterns, and perspectives that you embrace day in, day out, for months and years at a time. And your life reflects your state of mind. As minds get healthier, lives get healthier. As lives get healthier, bodies get healthier. And as bodies get healthier, they get dramatically more beautiful.

There’s no reason not to pursue the best body that’s available to you. The healthier, fitter, and more resilient you are, the more energy and confidence you will have to bring to your other pursuits, including the evolution of an extraordinary life, one that reflects your highest values and priorities.

But jonesing after some random idealized body (particularly one that isn’t yours) is rarely the best way to get there. On the contrary, it’s one of the fastest ways to start undermining your quality of life, and by extension, your opportunity to enjoy the very best body that is available to you — right now, and in this lifetime.

The way I see it, a given person’s “best body” reflects not just their personal health and fitness aspirations, but other life priorities of the moment. If you have a big job and a growing family and a lot of other things going on, your “ideal body” may be different than the “ideal body” you have while aggressively training for a figure competition, a ballet performance, or a leading role in a Hollywood film.

Then again, it might not. Only you can know what your life priorities and body will bear. Only you can decide what makes you happy. Generally, though, if you want to be healthier, leaner, and fitter, prepare to design a life in which you put more attention on that, and dedicate more time and resources to your nutrition, activity, sleep, recovery, and general well-being.

Meanwhile, try this: Act like you already have your best body. From the moment you wake up, bathe it, feed it, dress it, and move it like it’s the body you always dreamed of having. Sit, stand, and walk like you are already living in your ideal body, and soon, you’ll find that reality is a whole lot closer than you might have believed.

Back when I was in college, the Internet was a relatively new thing. Personal computers were still somewhat rare, and cell phones were about the size of a brick. They did pretty much one thing: make phone calls. I still remember calling a friend and telling her that I was talking to her from — wow! — my car.

Today, of course, all that has changed. The personal technologies that surround us are ubiquitous and automatic. They have come, in many ways, to define our lives. We interact with screens all day long, and our interactions with each other have come to rely on those digital portals.

Naturally, there are good and bad sides to all of this.

On the bright side, fitness trackers, monitors, health-promoting apps, virtual communities, and online coaching programs have made it easier for many people to access valuable information and support.

On the dark side, the rhythms of our lives have been profoundly disrupted by our always-online, plugged-in dependencies. And the same technologies that help support healthy choices in one context can utterly undermine them in another.

Being notified that you haven’t moved in two hours; seeing that you’re just 1,000 steps shy of your 10,000-step goal; being reminded that it’s time for a break, your vitamins, or a glass of water; getting an encouraging text from your health coach or fitness buddy; being able to Google a new kale recipe while you make dinner — these are all helpful, life-enhancing supports.

But research suggests that when we become too chained to our smartphones, tablets, TVs, PCs, and other digital devices, our moods, metabolism, mental acuity, and sleep patterns all suffer. We move less; we multitask more; we lose track of our physiological needs and natural appetites. We become less present to those we love, and to the present moment.

[callout]Even as we’re deluged with real-time information, interaction, and entertainment, we remain hungry, bored, and anxious.[/callout]

In a world of predictive-adaptive offers and invitations (“If you like that, we think you’d also like this!”), we’re forever enticed, tempted, and catered to — but rarely satisfied in any deep way.

Even as we’re deluged with real-time information, interaction, and entertainment, we remain hungry, bored, and anxious. Even as we’re bombarded by likes, comments, blips, badges, notifications, and alerts, some essential part of us remains lonely and alienated.

The digital realm can be a great source of insight and discovery, but it can also spew out all manner of misinformation, manipulation, and garbage (see “Turf Wars”).

Similarly, the realm of personalized health and medicine is evolving faster than most of us can make sense of. There are all sorts of lab tests that promise to tell us incredible amounts of information about our current health and fitness, our nutritional status, and genetic vulnerabilities (topics we address in “Making Sense of SNPs“, “Individualized Weight Loss“, and “The Functional Medicine Matrix“). But there are comparatively few experts who feel 100 percent confident in interpreting all that new data or making professional recommendations on the basis of it. There’s just too much new information emerging every day.

For all these reasons, my personal approach to integrating all this new stuff into my own life is cautious and evolving. I’ll try almost anything once, but if I’m not finding my life significantly improved by something, or if it demands too much of my time, money, energy, and mental bandwidth, I’ll let it drift to the wayside.

Over the past few years, I’ve test-driven all sorts of cool gadgets, apps, and online programs designed to support my health and happiness. I’ve found a lot of them incredibly helpful. In most cases, though, the experience I have with them resembles my first experience using a heart-rate monitor more than a decade ago: a combination of “gee whiz!” amazement and “hey, this is helpful” appreciation, followed by a gradual decline in interest.

Once I’d used my heart-rate monitor enough to correlate its readings with my own perceived exertion, I found I just didn’t need it much anymore.

In some ways, I think that’s the best possible experience one can hope to have in the high-tech age: Use health-supporting science and technology in whatever ways you find helpful, and then get back to being your best, most essential, unplugged self.

Listen to Episode

Why? It’s a question commonly associated with curious 3-year-olds (“Why is the sky blue? Why do I have a belly button?”) and with great philosophers (“Why are we here?”).

But perhaps the “why” questions that matter most to us in the context of our daily lives are the ones we ask ourselves: Why do we want what we want, care about what we care about? Why do we do the things we do?

I still remember the moment when I first landed on the big whys behind my own health and fitness goals. I remember because, for the first 10 years I pursued those goals, they were a perplexing source of frustration to me.

As much as I wanted to be healthy and strong, I kept doing things that disagreed with my stated priorities — often for reasons I didn’t entirely understand. Finally, frustrated by my own inconsistencies in desire and action, I embarked on some serious soul searching.

My initial question was simply “Why do I care about being healthy?”

[callout]My initial question was simply “Why do I care about being healthy?”[/callout]

My first layer of answers was pretty predictable: Because I want to look better, feel better, and have more energy. Basic stuff.

Then I began more deeply exploring those initial whys (as in “Why do those things matter to me?”). This churned up some interesting insights for me.

I realized, for example, that my “look-better why” was driven by my concerns not just with how aesthetically attractive I appeared to myself and others, but also with how my perceived level of health and fitness broadcast my inner characteristics and capacities — my levels of discipline and integrity, whether or not I had my act together, and so on.

My “feel-better why” reflected my desire not just to avoid the symptoms and discomforts of ill health, but also to be more present and confident in my body, and to more fully and fearlessly inhabit my life.

My “more-energy why” was tied not just to my desire to achieve and contribute at a higher level in my personal and professional lives, but also to my desire to explore new  interests, try new things, discover new capacities within myself.

Huh. Now I felt I was getting somewhere.

When I started digging around in these deeper answers for even bigger whys (as in “And why do those things matter?”), I started hitting even richer dirt. I discovered some previously unexplored core values I hadn’t really recognized as driving forces in my life — values like integrity, beauty, freedom, discovery, and courage.

When I looked at where I’d been running into trouble with my daily choices, I realized it was often when two or more of my values ran afoul of one another, or when two different levels of “why” started duking it out for primacy.

Take, for example, my concerns with my appearance.

Those concerns were driven on one (ostensibly superficial) level by my desire to be physically attractive and to impress others. And yet I could feel that a lot of my interest in appearing healthy was driven not just by my desire to “be beautiful” in the conventional sense, but also by my deeper desire to live a beautiful life — a life of integrity and courage in which my outward choices and inner values mirrored and agreed with one other.

In other words, the body I wanted to possess was really a symbol of the life I wanted to lead, and of the self I wanted to discover and become. 

The outward image I wanted to project was important to me, at the deepest level, because it represented the core values I wanted to actively embody and express.

Interestingly, when I made daily choices consistent with my value-driven whys (including my desire to live a beautiful, harmonious, high-integrity life), I felt good, clear, strong. I made conscious, empowering decisions for myself. And I did, indeed, look and feel much better as a result.

But whenever I lost track of that deeper sense of meaning — when I started obsessing about my physical appearance, chasing conventional notions of beauty, or judging myself against some unrealistic ideal — it made me absolutely miserable.

Moreover, I started noticing that this “superficial why” mindset consistently drove me toward unhealthy behaviors: cycles of undereating and overeating; obsessing in front of the mirror; overspending on clothes and cosmetics; numbing out in front of the TV instead of being active, being creative, or connecting with friends. Choices like that put me out of integrity, and left me feeling ugly, inside and out.

Ultimately, I realized, there was nothing inherently wrong with my valuing beauty (which also showed up in my appreciation of art, design, nature, compassion, and social harmony). Its impact depended entirely on how I engaged with it.

Sorting through the apparent tensions between my various whys eventually revealed my biggest “why” of all: I wanted to become my most essential and fully expressed self and to create a meaningful, worthwhile life I truly enjoyed.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Viktor Frankl, and a great many other wise souls (including, more recently, Start With Why author Simon Sinek) have remarked that an individual possessed with a big enough sense of “why” can manage the challenges and discomforts of virtually any “how.”

This is an important truth to keep in mind when faced with the onslaught of external obstacles and internal resistance we are likely to encounter on our healthy-living journey.

Because when things get tough, just wanting a bikini body, six-pack abs, or a more impressive bench press than your buddy probably isn’t going to cut it.

Eager to start exploring your own deeper whys around health? Here are some good ways to start:

• Consider the kinetic chain of desire. Even small and apparently silly desires are often rooted into bigger and more central ones. Why do you care — really — about being healthy, strong, resilient, fit? Keep asking: And why do those things matter? What values do they represent?
• Notice disconnects. Are any of your whys fighting each other? At what levels do they agree or conflict? Can you create more powerful motivation by more consciously tapping into your deepest whys and integrating them into your sense of identity?
• Observe your results. When you do things that seem to work against your goals, notice: What was the mindset that got you there? How did you end up disconnected from the deeper sense of purpose that might have driven a better choice, and how can you access it more reliably in the future?
• Review and reconnect daily. Having a ritual that includes a regular review of your big whys can be a powerful way to keep them top of mind. Try taping a list of them to your coffeemaker, workspace, mirror, or other high-visibility spot.
• In a culture that’s only too happy to tell us what we should want, be, and do, there is perhaps no more revolutionary act than simply reclaiming your own healthy sense of “why” and living it a little more fully each day.

I have LONG been fascinated by the myriad, mysterious connections between various parts of the human system: between body and mind; between thought and emotion; between emotion and biochemistry, biochemistry and belief, belief and behavior — the list goes on.

Just as there are no discrete stopping and starting places in the body (parts of the fingers extend into the hand, parts of the hand into the arm, and so on), there are no distinct stopping and starting places between our bodies and our daily experiences, our environment, and the social structures by which we are formed.

How we process and respond to all we experience is, of course, quite individual. But there are also strong patterns we hold in common.

For example, we know that stressful thoughts and feelings tend to provoke a cascade of inflammatory and immune-suppressing hormones and neurochemicals. We also know that pleasurable feelings and moments of relaxation and emotional connection provoke a cascade of healing, pro-growth and anti-inflammatory compounds.

What qualifies as a stressful or pleasurable experience varies from person to person, though. And it turns out that our attitudes about the stressful stimuli we encounter can be the determining factor in whether they break us down, make us stronger, or both. (For more on that, see “Good Stress/Bad Stress”.)

When I first learned about all these interconnections, I was agog. But even after I understood the science, it took me a long time to accept that every thought, feeling, and encounter I had could catalyze constructive or destructive effects in my body.

I still find it astonishing that the ties between my emotional responses and my cell tissue, are, in fact, quite direct. And of course, it works the other way around, too: Imbalances in my biochemistry can just as quickly trigger imbalances in my mental and emotional state. (For more on that, check out the microbiome insights in “Healthy Gut, Healthy Brain”.)

To date, such connections are not well understood by much of the medical establishment. But that is changing.

Years ago, I interviewed Connie Grauds, RPh, a pharmacist who had practiced conventional medicine for years before she traveled to the Amazonian jungle to learn about medicinal botanicals. She wound up staying for nearly two decades and becoming initiated as a shamana by the traditional healers with whom she trained.

[callout]One way or another, we are all connected to everyone and everything around us.[/callout]

Grauds explained to me that, according the medicine of the Peruvian Amazon, there is only one disease: Susto, a disease of fear and disconnection. It can be a disconnection from physical nourishment, from nature, from our loved ones and community, from our sense of purpose, or from spirit.

Whatever the cause, when we feel disconnected, Grauds says, we feel ill at ease, and this can manifest as a variety of physical maladies within the body.

I reflected on this notion a great deal this summer, after losing my dad and my beloved dog, Frida, in the space of two months. Those abrupt losses threw my whole world and my health into a tizzy: For several weeks, I experienced disruptions in my sleep, appetite, energy, focus, and sense of well-being.

The cure, of course, was reconnecting — with friends and loved ones, with my own daily self-care practices, with the gratitude I felt about having had such good beings in my life — and finally, with my new canine pal, Calvin, a rescue pit bull who is reminding me what it means to romp and play with abandon, even when I am sad.

On several occasions in the year leading up to his death, my father told me that he was experiencing an increasingly poignant sense of connection to everyone and everything he encountered — strangers, animals, plants, you name it. “Honey,” he said, “it’s the most amazing thing — I feel like the membrane between me and the rest of the world is thinning.”

I think what my father sensed was a perennial truth about which most of us are only occasionally aware — that our perception of separateness is probably an illusion. One way or another, we are all connected to everyone and everything around us.

We assembled this issue of Experience Life with the goal of illuminating at least a few of those powerful connections, and with the hope of encouraging you to explore and appreciate more of your own.

Week 1 (84:31)

Week 2 (88:49)

Week 3 (84:23)

Week 4 (83:40