The Art of Health Maintenance

Cars are a beautiful analogy for how we treat our bodies.

What if you could only own one car for your entire life?

How would you treat it?

What would you do to ensure it kept running the way you wanted it to?

Bill MacEachern is the original owner of his 1976 Porsche 911 Turbo with 1,330,386 kilometers (826,000+ miles) and counting!

This Porsche is no garage queen. Bill has driven this from Toronto to California 8 times and is still racking up the miles whenever he can.

This is a beautiful story of longevity and commitment to a machine with lessons we can apply to our own health.

In many ways, our bodies are like a high performance Porsche but even more sophisticated. The difference is that our bodies are a living system. We started out as spark of energy that brought together an egg and a sperm from our parents. This egg and sperm became a tiny embryo that continued to multiply and differentiate to create our skin, connective tissues, vital organs, bones, muscles, and nervous system.

It all culminates into a high performance vehicle that became you!

The amazing miracle of our living system is that we have the ability to heal and grow throughout our lives. Almost every cell in our body turns over approximately every seven years.

But it is inevitable that at a certain point, we start to deteriorate faster than we can regenerate.

The medical system’s primary goal is to provide repairs and delay death, not to optimize health.

The longer I have studied health and medicine, the more we learn that many of the most commonly prescribed medications have varying levels of adverse effects and downstream complications and trade-offs.

Medicine is not without its risks and downsides. Even "routine" surgical procedures have a risk of fatal complications. Chemotherapy and radiation can destroy cancer cells but also damage healthy cells.

So why are these more invasive interventions the first line and not the last resort?

The Car Analogy

I drive a car that I got new in 2007—a Stormy Blue Mazda Miata aka "Mia." It was my dream car, and I still love driving it till this day. Like Bill, I have not babied this car. This is my daily driver. I take road trips whenever I can. I go to the gym and get groceries with it. I’ve made the 1400-plus mile trip from San Francisco to Seattle a few times.

At this point, this car feels like an extension of myself.

Throughout my ownership, Mia has had some minor fender benders from my own mistakes and some dings from parking lots. But, she has never left me stranded on the road.

I credit a lot of Mia’s longevity to it’s inherent design and basic maintenance—simple design, regular oil changes and maintenance, tire rotations, covered parking as much as possible, and addressing small issues before they become big ones.

The way the car is driven and treated is what leads to longevity.

Each vehicle was designed for a purpose. Some cars are better for hauling things and going off road. Other cars are meant to save gas and be easy to park in the city. Other cars are designed to go fast and push the limits of physics around a race track.

The way I drive suits my car.

It’s not the fastest or doesn’t have the highest amount of grip. The Miata was designed to be an engaging and fun car. Something that brings a smile to your face and keeps you involved.

So I try to drive it in a spirited way without putting her in an environment where she doesn’t belong or doing things she wasn’t designed to do.

I understand my Miata’s purpose and built-in strengths and weaknesses.

Our Bodies Were Designed For A Purpose And Specific Environments

Just like vehicles, the human body evolved with certain quirks and features.

Our bodies allow us to navigate the environment on our feet, pick things up with our hands, interact with other humans, and experience the world.

Within the human population, there are genetic variations in body types, metabolic types, and disease risk.

Much of this has to do with the environments where our ancestors lived and evolved.

The genetics you have are the blueprint of what you could be. And the way you live your life on a day-to-day basis is translating that genetic blueprint into your current reality.

This is called epigenetics ("above genetics"). This means that while we have certain in-born genetic traits, many of these genes are turned on or off depending on inputs from our environment, lifestyle, and behavior.

We need nourishing food, stimulation from physical movement, connection to the natural world, sense of purpose, connection and community, a non-toxic environment, and restorative sleep to keep the body running optimally.

This is what we call self-care, but I prefer to call this maintenance.

This is the equivalent of filling up the gas tank, inflating the tires, and getting oil changes in your car to keep it on the road so you don’t get stranded.

If You Had To Create A Classified Ad For Yourself, What Would It Look Like?

Don’t actually put yourself up for sale. This is a thought exercise!

When I browse Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for fun, I begin to see interesting differences between car listings.

You can often find the same year, make, and model of car with completely different states of repair or disrepair.

One listing is for a single-owner vehicle. It may have high mileage but the paint looks new and the interior is clean and well-kept. The owner has all the service records and the maintenance is up to date.

Then there could be another identical vehicle.

It has similar mileage, but then as you look closer, you can see that the paint is faded, the tires are bald, and there are obvious signs of impacts with other objects. Then you see photos of the interior and the seats are torn or the radio is missing. And of course the maintenance history is absent or spotty at best.

Two similar cars. Two very different lives.

The one that is well maintained is less likely to need a costly repair or have a catastrophic failure. It is still very road worthy and will very likely be able to help the next owner create a lot of new memories with it.

The one that has not been maintained has a "check engine light" but "drives fine and stops." It’s going to require a lot more time at the mechanic and money to keep it on the road. Worst case, the vehicle is too far gone and needs to be scrapped.

Which one would you entrust to get you from point A to point B?

What Does This Analogy Mean For Your Health?

While the car analogy has its limits because a car is not alive, your body is a living system.

Our bodies have the equivalent of various check engine lights, just like a car.

The researcher, Robert Naviaux calls these check engine lights the "Cell Danger Response" or CDR. He revealed a common underlying issue common across many, if not all, of the chronic diseases we see today.

When the CDR signal increases, this creates symptoms that you feel and that doctors diagnose with different disease labels.

Have you or a loved one been told you have any of the following?

This lens of the cell danger response gives us a specific therapeutic target to both maintain our health and reverse many diseases that we have once believed needed to be cured with a high-tech, novel therapies.

So does it make sense to treat each one as a separate disease or as different presentations of the same underlying problem?

Does it make sense to wait for pharmaceutical companies to develop a new drug to treat your specific label?

Or can you begin to remove the source of what is triggering the cell danger response and let your body heal itself?

This is why maintenance via health aligned with nature’s laws are simultaneously prevention, maintenance, and solution.

P.S. Do you want my help looking for the cause of your body’s cell danger response and coming up with a strategy for living more aligned with nature?

Schedule a consult here https://l.bttr.to/uYxzi or reach out via email.