Here's to a Healthy and Happy New Year!

Hard-cover edition, color illustrations

Did you make New Years resolutions about exercising and eating healthy food? Why do we focus on food and exercise when we think about healthy living? Certainly, these are important, yet many other activities are also essential to keeping us healthy - in the New Year and in years to come. 

The Bewildered Patient's Whole-Body Health Guide explores the major systems of the body - how they work and how we can keep them healthy for a long and productive life. Daily choices  are crucial to long-term health!

One of the reasons we focus on food is that food is a major motivator for humans - as it is for all animals. We can't survive without consuming a constant source of nutrients, so we usually eat two or three meals every day. Unlike plants, we can't make our own nutrients. And unlike fungi, we can't soak up nutrients from the products of decay in the soil around us. We have to eat.

Obtaining food if we're hungry is probably one of the strongest human motivators. Avoiding pain is another. Securing protection and finding affection (including sex in adults) are impulses that also score high on the motivation scale.

Unlike eating, exercise isn't usually something we consciously want to do much of the time. And yet, without exercise, our muscles become weaker and weaker, and then calories from excess food are transformed into fat, which is stored throughout the body. This can become a vicious cycle.

Soft-cover edition, B&W illustrati

We make many choices in our lives that affect health and longevity. Besides exercise and nutrition, we need to avoid toxins in the environment and hazards in our daily lives. The Bewildered Patient's Whole-Body Health Guide offers tips and strategies for maintaining these aspects of health - as well as many others!

While considering the body as a whole, the book also views bodily functions on a system-by-system basis in language that lay-people can understand. Even those with no training in biology or medicine can learn how organs and cells work together to keep us healthy! This whole-body health guide also explores what may go wrong in the body's many systems and what we can do to keep those systems working well for a long and healthy lifetime!

Here's to your health in the New Year!!