What makes you decide to become healthier? Usually, you have to feel bad first in order to want to feel better. As Kevin says, “Most people don’t even realize how bad they’ve felt all along until they start feeling good.” So what’s the first step to feeling better? I like to start with recognizing your symptoms.

Start by taking a closer look at all your symptoms. See how many things you can come up with that bother you either everyday or even once in a while—allergies, stomach upset, a lingering pain from an old injury. When I first began my “healing” journey after I was diagnosed with cancer, I couldn’t believe all the symptoms that I had been ignoring all those years. All those things since childhood had been like speed bumps in my path showing me that I was living an unhealthy lifestyle and heading towards health issues. Each nagging symptom was like a little warning to be more careful about what I ate and how I took care of myself. But I didn’t listen because I didn’t even realize they were symptoms, I just thought it was normal to feel those things. I went to several doctors to help get rid of the symptoms. When they couldn’t help me, I actually thought it was “normal” and everyone had sinus problems, fatigue, headaches and so on?! No!!! We are meant to wake up in the morning, put our feet on the floor and say “I feel great and can’t wait to start my day.” If we’re not, then something is out of balance, something is creating those symptoms. It wasn’t until I started cleansing, detoxing, identifying and removing contributing factors that I was able to wake up and say I felt great! Believe it or not, when I did, in just 30 days, I was able to feel better than I had in my entire life.

The best way to start recognizing the root of your symptoms is to take a piece of paper and list out all the things you feel. Then rate each symptom on a scale of 1-10. The next step, is to discover what is causing those symptoms. What are you putting into your body and how do you feel immediately after, 2 hours later, 24 hours later or even three days later? Now seal it in an envelope and put it away. Once you start listing this stuff out, you might already start seeing the root of your health problems from a physical perspective (there’s a whole other aspect relating to emotional root causes, but today we’re just focusing on the physical). But perhaps you think you eat good, live healthy, have a “normal” amount of stress at work and at home and have a “normal amount” of allergies. Normal? There’s no such thing! What’s your normal is not my normal or another person’s. What one person is sensitive to, another one isn’t. What may seem like it’s overall healthy according to ads, media or what we learned in school may not be right for a specific person.

The important thing is to remove the word normal from your thinking and see what applies specifically to you and you alone. Maybe you are eating healthy enough, but your body isn’t absorbing the nutrients you need from it. Maybe you aren’t cut out to work 10 hours per day like your job demands. Maybe you have low energy and need more rest than your lifestyle allows. So many things can factor in to our individual symptoms and underlying causes. If you’ve read my book, Choose To Live, then you already know what my daily work schedule and diet was like on Wall Street. It was crazy to say the least! How I functioned in that life was going against my natural ability to be healthy.

Taking care of ourselves starts with recognizing when something is wrong. Be sensitive to how you feel. Check in and see what’s not right. Even try different things to see if something changes for the better or worse. Maybe you thought that knee pain was something you had to live with until you switched from jogging to yoga. Or maybe you noticed your hay fever disappeared that time you gave up sugar and gluten or started juicing. You really never know what’s causing those symptoms until you try something different. If you’re interested in how to do this and transform your health on your own through my step by step Jumpstart Home-study system (all my checklists are included in the Home-study), you can check it out here.

It’s amazing what happens when you start paying attention to your symptoms and making changes to your diet and lifestyle. You may notice that you don’t need two or more cups of coffee to stay awake. You won’t be sneezing and blowing your nose as soon as the first blooms appear in the Fall or Spring.

After you’ve made the changes for a month or so, do another symptom checklist and pull out the envelope with the first checklist and compare them. You’ll likely be surprised that some have disappeared and others have improved. Get use to not being normal! It’s all about you and how you feel, pay attention to that. So go ahead and free yourself from your symptoms so you can get back in control of your health.

What do your symptoms feel like?