A quick note before I begin: everything here is my own experience and what has worked for me. It is not medical advice. I am not a doctor, and I am not telling you what to do with your body or your health. I am simply sharing my story and the beliefs that have shaped it. If you have health challenges, please talk to a qualified professional.
I have not had a single day sick since October 2022. It's about a year and a half later now, and what you're going to hear about is the key stories and journeys I've had to get here. I've been reasonably healthy for most of my life, but I've also had periods of consistent illness. A year and a half is the longest I've ever gone by far in my life, including things like childhood. I have never been this healthy for this long in my entire life. Think about it: I'm as old as I've ever been, and I've been very sick at lots of other times in my life. For example, when I was a police officer in 2009, I took seven full weeks off of work. Several of those weeks were from illness and sickness, and many other times I just went to work sick and tried to push through it.
The number one thing I attribute it to: intention and commitment
The number one thing I can attribute to being healthy every day over the last year and a half is my intention and commitment to health. I've been sober almost 10 years now, and since then I've been very committed to figuring out: what can I do to be healthy? How much healthier can I get? How healthy can my body be? There are a lot of daily practices I do that are supportive, but there's nothing more supportive than the beliefs and the desire I have that drive this.
I love being healthy because being healthy means I have energy to do everything I love doing. I have a life filled with things that I love doing, and I want to have energy and enthusiasm, and I want my body to work well so that I can do the stuff I love doing. One of the greatest forms of wealth is health. And a lot of our society is actually set up to program us negatively, so I've done a lot of work. I've read a lot of books over the last 10 years especially to reprogram my thinking, and I'll share some of the stories related to that now.
Reprogramming how I think about health
I read a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. (I keep a complete reading list on my site.) In my experience, that book helped me understand the mind-body connection — that the things you think and the symptoms you feel are often very related. And if you can tap into what a physical symptom is and how it relates to what you're thinking, then, for me, you can transcend a lot of the ideas you have about health and get exceptionally healthy.
Let me define what it means to me to be sick, and what it means to me to be healthy. To me, to be sick is to be drained of energy. Often you associate being sick with laying in bed and having no energy. So to me, to feel totally, utterly drained of energy when I didn't decide to rest is being sick. Being sick is having your body consistently in pain, or having several symptoms with a story that goes along with it, like "well, I got a cold, I got a flu." And to be healthy, to me, means to have energy to do all the things I want to do. It means that my body is functioning properly — it doesn't have to be functioning perfectly, but the vast majority of my body is working. To be healthy means I can do my yoga practice, that I can be there to take care of the kids, that I can make videos, and have an enjoyable day in my body.
The last time I was sick: October 2022
The last time I was sick was at the end of October 2022. It was Sunday night, and I started to feel a big drain on energy. I'd made so much progress with my health that there were no other symptoms — it was simply a drain of energy you'd associate with being sick, along with a foreboding, a fear of being sick. Because the next day I had a plane flight booked to go help my mother move from Mississippi to live next door to me, in the house she bought. I'd been wanting this to happen for a long time, at least five, maybe close to 10 years.
My body became so drained of energy that I was pretty much stuck in bed on Monday morning. I called her and said I wasn't going to be able to make the plane flight that day, that I was stuck laying in bed. I had a couple of days where my energy was completely drained after that, and I rebooked the flight to Wednesday.
At the time, I didn't realize the mental thing going on, but I realized it later. Consciously, I was looking forward to helping my mother move, and I was very excited about it. But unconsciously, there was a part of me that really did not want to go help my mother move — that wanted any excuse not to go. Because helping her move meant spending a week at her house doing lots of work, and giving up all my normal life. I wouldn't get to see my wife or my kids for a week. I wouldn't get to film any videos. I wouldn't get to play video games — at the time I was playing a game called God's Unchained a lot (although I still managed to play a little of it on the road). I wouldn't get to go to yoga. I wouldn't get to do my regular AA meetings. A big part of me really did not want to go.
This is one of the biggest breakthroughs I've had about health: that part of me which did not want to go help my mother move was an unacknowledged part of me. It was thoughts and feelings and emotions that I wasn't consciously tapping into or engaging with. There was a strong desire in me to not go, and my body gave me what I was unconsciously desiring. It gave me a way to get what I wanted. It said, "Oh, you don't want to go help your mother move? Well, let's go drain all your energy. There you go — now you can't help your mother move."
In our society, we've very much conditioned our bodies and our minds that if you're sick, you can get out of doing something. If you're healthy, you have to go to school, you have to go to work. But if you're sick, you can skip school, you can skip work. So we've conditioned our bodies and minds to say: if you don't want to do something, just get sick. And that's exactly what my body was doing. When I caught my body doing that, and when I understood that my body manifested this because on some level I wanted it to, I haven't been sick a single day since. That's a breakthrough I hope you can take into your own life.
On the day I woke up and told my mother I was too sick to come, I also started to consciously really focus on the truth: I really do want to help my mother move. I don't care if I have to give up my own life for a week. I really, really want to help her. It didn't happen instantly, but my body's energy started to rev up to the point where, on Wednesday, I had just enough energy to take the plane flight and go see her. On Thursday, I got into helping her move. Over the next week, mostly by myself, I moved about 15,000 pounds — loaded into a truck and unloaded out of it, into a landfill or to give away. About 15,000 pounds, just a few days after I'd been sick. My body's energy revved up perfectly to meet the challenge, because I wanted it to.
After I realized that my body makes itself sick if it thinks that's what I want, and that my body sends me signals through my symptoms, I understood that if I address my mind and my lifestyle and my thinking — acknowledge and look at what's going on — I can eliminate the need to be sick. This is part of why I share all of this so openly with the Jerry Banfield Family.
The little sensation in my throat this morning
Here's something that happened today. I woke up with a slight little burning sensation in my throat. In the past, that would have turned into fear — "Oh my God, I don't want to get sick, I don't want a sore throat, I can't do this again" — and then I'd go into all these negative stories and basically start berating my body: "You're betraying me. You can't do this."
One thing that has been essential to my health is love. Love the body. Do not berate the body or hate the body. "You're disappointing me, you've betrayed me, why are you doing this again?" — that kind of thinking, putting that energy into my body, is what made it consistently sick, in my experience.
So what did I do today when I felt that little sensation in my throat? I asked, "What are you trying to tell me, body? Are you trying to tell me to focus and give you some more energy?" And I started thinking: I love my throat. I love how healthy it is. I love how it swallows food. I love how it has such a strong voice to get out there and help people in the world. I love you, body. I really appreciate you. I appreciate the abundant health you give me. I appreciate waking up with energy in the morning. I know you'll fix this little feeling right away. I love you, and I know you've given this to me for a purpose.
Louise Hay has a book called Heal Your Body, which I keep around in my office. She went much deeper into this than I do. She found that specific parts of the body often go with specific lines of thinking. For the throat, she describes it as an avenue of expression, a channel of creativity, with the affirmation: "I open my heart and sing the joys of love." And a sore throat, she suggests, can be a signal that you're feeling an inability to speak up for yourself, that you've swallowed anger, stifled creativity, or refused to change. The affirmations she offers are things like: "It's okay to make noise. I express myself freely and joyously. I speak up for myself with ease. I express my creativity." And for me, one phrase in particular: "I am willing to change."
"I am willing to change"
In 2019, I was reading Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life, and she referenced the throat, coughing, and willingness to change, with the affirmation "I am willing to change." I was coughing, and I tried it. I said, "I'm willing to change. I'm changing. I'm willing to change." And my coughing instantly stopped. I have never had any consistent cough in the five years since. As soon as that first cough comes, I say, "I'm willing to change. I'm changing." That's been my experience.
Right after I said that in 2019, I realized I needed to ask my wife for money. That was the change I was trying not to make. When I said "I'm willing to change," I realized the change I needed to make was to ask my wife for money. I thought, "Oh, I really don't want to do this." But since I was willing to change, I did it. I cried, and I felt like less of a man. And now I'm in the most abundant wealth I've ever been in my whole life, because I was willing to change. I'm giving my wife back the money she gave me, and I'm paying my own way. My body is healthier than it's ever been before, because I was willing to change.
Now my throat feels great most of the day. If it occasionally has a tiny sensation in it, I do not expect that I'm getting sick. I expect that the sensation will quickly go away, and I use it as a call to action.
Stiff knees, and how yoga came into my life
My knees were getting stiff in 2018 and 2019. Finally, in 2020, I looked up what it might mean to have stiff knees. Stiff knees, in this framework, are a sign of rigid thinking, of inflexibility. So I started doing yoga. Sometimes it's hard to directly fix the mind, but if you work on the flexibility of the body, in my experience the mind becomes more flexible too. A lot of the feelings we have are a reflection of mental rigidity — that we won't just relax and open up and change and adjust our thinking.
The daily health practices that support me
Let me wrap up with the daily health practices I do — because the thinking is huge, and it's what makes me want to do these practices in the first place.
Sleep
One of the biggest things I do for health is get my sleep. Almost every night, I'm in bed well before 11pm, sometimes as early as 9:30. I go to bed with my wife, and I rarely get up before 7am. That's eight to nine and a half, some nights almost 10, hours in bed every night. That's way more sleep than most adults get, and it gives me the rest that illness is often trying to force me to take. Since I rest my body so much normally, my body doesn't need to compensate by getting ill in order to make me rest. I generally don't have more than one night of disturbed or less-than-eight-hours sleep at a time. I have a blacked-out room. I sleep with the kids in their bunk beds — they asked me to sleep in the room to keep them feeling safe, so they don't need to get up, and all of us sleep very well almost every night.
Morning fuel and matcha
When I get up, I immediately eat. I have a little something that helps my body get going and kicks my energy off, plus some green ground-up matcha tea. That helps me get my energy going right away without overclocking into something like coffee.
Yoga
I go to yoga most mornings at 9am, after getting the kids off to school. Yoga really helps move the energy around in the body, and this is one of the major causes of illness I've been able to isolate at lots of points in my life — not just illness, but muscle pains, aches, and rigid mental thinking. I do power, active workout-style classes: vinyasa, sometimes hot yoga, hatha flow. In a class I'll end up doing 10 to 20 push-ups plus a bunch of squats, and a lot of times it works up a good sweat. A lot of the sickness I've noticed in myself and in other people comes from stuck energy — energy stuck in certain parts of the body so it's not flowing as much elsewhere. Yoga has been very helpful for moving my energy. I do yoga five or six days a week.
If I don't do yoga, I'll be active in my yard. I walk the dog most days — a few blocks in the morning and a few at night. On days I don't go to yoga, I'll do a much longer walk, 30 minutes to an hour. I'm also getting back into playing tennis, doing something more vigorous besides yoga. I played tennis yesterday.
Diet: mostly whole plant foods
For my diet, I eat mostly whole plant foods: fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans, with either no processing — straight out of the produce section — or minimal processing, so the integrity of the food isn't shredded. For example, tofu is processed beans, so for me it's ideal to eat the beans cooked rather than the tofu, since the tofu has been processed and had a lot added and some of the nutrients removed.
If you want to read more about this way of eating, there's a book called How Not to Die, written by a medical doctor, who argues you can prevent, stop the progression of, and sometimes even reverse many of the top causes of death by eating this way. I want to be clear this is his argument and my personal experience, not medical advice from me. What I can say is that, in my experience, eating a whole-food, plant-based diet has been extremely supportive for my health. It's helped my body effortlessly get to a healthy weight, it helps everything function better, and it's very easy and affordable to do. I do prioritize organic foods — they seem to taste better and feel cleaner to me — though I've gone back and forth on it. Organic is preferable for me, but if it's not available, that's okay.
Work I love
Then I do work I love. Just doing a job you hate can be enough, on its own, to get your body sick to try to get you out of work. As I explained with helping my mother move, lots of times when I did jobs I didn't like, my body would get sick because it wanted to stay home. When I didn't want to go to school as a kid, I couldn't just ask my dad to let me stay home — I had to be sick.
I've told my kids: just stop with the getting-sick stuff to stay home from school. If you want to stay home, just say so. You can stay home anytime you want. Now, if you miss too much school, you'll have to be homeschooled, so most of the time you'll go. I literally told my daughter the other day, when she was trying to play the "I'm sick" card, "I know you're not sick. You're trying to make yourself sick to get out of going to school." I explained to her exactly what I'm telling you here. She was laying in bed, not eating, trying to make herself feel sick. I said, "Look, if you want to stay home, just stay home. That's all you have to do. You don't need a reason. Just say, 'Dad, I want to stay home from school today.' Great. But I'd prefer you have your normal energy, have a good day, and really enjoy yourself." She instantly picked her energy up and had a normal day at home. I'd told her this before, but this time it sank in. We took several walks with the dog, she ate all our normal food, she felt great, and there was no sickness. This is why I make videos — because people who shared these ideas with me really helped change my life, which is why I'm sharing them with you.
Massage, intimacy, and connection
I get a massage every week, which really helps my body relax and release tension that isn't getting released through yoga. I also have a very active life with intimacy and time with my wife — we have sex every other day, and I've found that's very supportive for both my health and hers. And I'm around people all the time. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which give my life purpose and help keep me on track. I obviously don't do any mind-altering substances — no alcohol, no drugs, nothing from a doctor. I don't even take vitamin supplements, except for one minimal B12 supplement, which is recommended for people who don't generally eat meat.
Taking 100% responsibility
So I'm in the absolute best health I've ever been in, and my brain is functioning the best it ever has. I'm expecting the same going forward. I also take responsibility: if for some reason my body does manifest some kind of sickness or challenge, I believe some part of me has manifested it to fulfill some desire I have. Taking 100% responsibility has really helped me with my health.
I'll talk a lot more about the theory and more of my experiences over time, as I keep writing my autobiography. If you'd like to follow more of this journey, you can watch my Life playlist. You might also find these helpful: how I lost 80 pounds and transformed my health, here is hope for your health challenges, and what a quality life and the health connection mean to me. Again, none of this is medical advice — it's simply what has worked for me, and I hope something in it serves you.