A healthy person has a thousand wishes. A sick person only has one. This aphorism has been worded various ways and attributed to Confucius but some say it wasn’t him. Who cares, it’s totally true.

“If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.” - Prince Humperdinck

“The first wealth is health.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

You never know when you’ll get diagnosed with something or be in an accident. Skeletal muscle is essentially “honey in the hive” when you have a health crisis: it helps you heal faster, fight off infection better, improves immune function, and reduces your risk of disease.

Maintaining and improving the health you already possess is the best health insurance you can get. A healthy lifestyle doesn’t protect you from illness and accidents, but it minimizes the how much time, energy, and money it will cost you to recover. 

And you can’t access this state of well-being retroactively. It’s created and maintained through endless unsexy daily actions: what you eat and drink, what you breathe in, how you move your body, how much you sleep, how you manage your mind. You commit to it every day so it’s there when you need it.

As RuPaul says, “If you stay ready, you ain’t got to get ready.”

The body is in a constant state of flux and what we do on a daily basis creates the body we live in over time. It’s never finished. Your regular habits add up. You have the ability to change what you see in the mirror, whether you are healing, building muscle, or becoming more flexible.