What do you consider a healthy diet, or a healthy lifestyle? Is it taking those pills and vitamins every morning? Eat an apple a day (…to keep the doctor away)? A morning jog? Just three cups of coffee? Sleep through the night at least twice a week? Not eat cake every other day? If it is, or something remotely similar, it will keep you alive. This is considered the “normal” lifestyle, the normal diet. It gives you what is considered “normal” or “average” health. But is that what you want? Do you want to be just average level of health, become lazy in your thirties, get weaker and slower as you age, cavities, cancer, sickness, disease, fatigue? Or do you want to be above “average”? Beyond “normal”?

If you answered yes (which I assume is why you’re reading this), I have good news and bad news. The good news is that it is entirely possible to have health that is not considered natural in these “modern” times! This unreal health means that an eighty-year-old man can be as strong as an eighteen-year-old boy in “normal” health. A thousand years ago, it was like that. It means that women can go into labor quickly and without complications (rest of the family reads = no more waiting than 12 hours). It means better senses, stronger body, faster mind. It means no more doctors, dentists, surgeries (unless you do something really bad), sick days. It means never being sick again in some cases!

But this is where the bad news comes. If you want to live differently from others, you must live differently from others. What I mean is that if you want unreal health, you must live a radically different life. And by radically different, I mean a lifestyle that often goes directly against what everyone else is doing and what big business is telling you. If you live and act differently, you will be different (for better or for worse). For example (this would be for the worse), if you ate ten pounds of sugar a day, you would live incredibly differently from everyone else, and therefore you would be incredibly different. In this case, you would get fat in a week and die soon after. But hey, you’d be different!

Now, if you want to be different in a good way, you will have to act the same. You will only get results if you work for them. The more you work, the more results you will get. The better you work, the higher quality results you will get. This means that if you try to cheat on your training and diet, guess what, you will get horrible results. If any.

So if you don’t want that, you have to work better. This would mean not indulging in that extra snack, doing proper form and full reps and those exercises, going to bed on time. These are small things, and from them you will get small results. If you want better results, you can’t see these things as rules. You’re not supposed to see it as eating few calories a day or running at least an hour a day. If he sees them as rules, he will break them as if they were rules (don’t deny it, wasn’t it once said that rules were made to be broken?).

Now what? If you don’t follow these good rules like exercise one hour a day, eat vegetables, don’t eat sugar and others, how will you be healthy? It’s simple, most things really are. You don’t follow the rules that other people made. You must adopt the lifestyle, the philosophy, behind them. You assimilate them, you make them part of you. You don’t see it as something you have to do, you see it as something you want to do.

Think about this. You don’t do what others tell you (it’s true). You do what you tell yourself to do. You don’t listen to other people’s words, you listen to your own. You must decide to do something, nobody can force you to do something. No, you cannot, you will not follow the rules that others give you. Human beings cannot follow rules. We follow what is in us. I’m not trying to get all “dainty” or anything like that. What I’m saying is that if you believe in something, if it’s part of you, you do it. If you think smoking is bad for you, you won’t smoke. If someone tells you it’s bad, or tells you to stop, you’ll just know it’s bad and you won’t believe it. Once something becomes a part of you, you act on it.

If you want vibrant, unreal, extreme health, you can’t just follow the rules. You must live a lifestyle, adopt a philosophy that is so radically different from everyone else, that you cannot hide it. If you want to be healthier than everyone else, you can’t be like everyone else. You must break with everyone, break with everything that is average. Don’t turn into an animal, but don’t be normal! Do not separate yourself from your family and friends, but let them know that you are different.

My family eats sugary cereal, needs air conditioning and heating, eats sweets regularly, eats a lot and often, and is afraid of pain. I eat no sugar (and now no grains either), eat raw meat and eggs, bone/marrow broth (and occasionally just bones), occasionally sleep outside (with a brick for a pillow), climb trees, and play with swords and working out while everyone else lays down sweating and swimming, and laughing when they try to hurt me. Now, do you see me differently? I’m different? I am the healthiest in my family (which is not a small family). Do you want to be different? Are you willing to act different?