Ludwig Heinz - Live right, live longer

That was the beginning of my clinical career, in which I later specialized in oncology and hematology while doing cancer research. Since then I have been able to accompany, treat, and support many patients like Martha Allen and Robert Tucker with cancer and other serious illnesses. I have experienced how individual patients deal with the cancer diagnosis and the burdens associated with it, how they fight to regain their health, or how they come out of it healed but with the fear of relapse or of late consequences as unloved companions, or how they lose the fight and die of the disease.

On my list of recommendations for patients there were originally four entries. I made a point of having them all start with the letter »L« as in »Love«, so they might be easily remembered.

Loving

Laughter

Learning

Lifelong fitness

The list was well received just on the basis of the speech rhythm, but it clearly compressed the recommendations for which the words stood. In »Love« I include, as I have mentioned, the entire area of social integration and passion for a given task. With »Laughter« I mean the entire range of humor, a positive view of life, and contentment. With »Learning« I mean the conscious use of and training of our cognitive abilities. And with »Lifelong fitness« physical activity altogether.

Finally, my four L-concepts were joined by a fifth, of which I had long assumed that it was surely already sufficiently anchored in the heads of most people – until I realized that particularly in this case there were quite a lot of misunderstandings. The issue is how we nourish ourselves, and I had to make a bit of an effort to get this point into an L-concept. What resulted was:

Lighter eating

So – Loving, Laughter, Learning, Lifelong fitness, Lighter eating. Those are the five things we can practice in order to stay healthy. They are fundamental to our humanity, they pervade our entire life, and they influence our physical as well as our mental health, as I will show in the following chapters. I am writing these chapters not with the purpose of producing a book of advice that will guarantee a healthy life to everyone who follows it blindly. That, of course, is impossible because we do not have an unlimited range of action in our efforts to stay healthy. Additionally, I believe that the success of such books depends importantly on their readers and their ability actually to integrate the respective recommendations into their lives. I myself bought a book of advice once. Its title was Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No. 2It was meant for people like me who have problems with refusing someone a favor. I’m not entirely sure that I succeed in the meanwhile in saying »No« when I really ought to, and, if I do, what role this book of advice played in that success. I would say that I have in any event been made more aware of the problem and possible solutions.

Should I succeed with this book in making the reader more aware of the problems and possible solutions in matters of health, then I would be satisfied for a start. The five things that we can do in order to stay healthy basically constitute a plan for a fulfilled life – a plan that we possibly already have at the back of our minds, but the realization of which is all too often sabotaged by our habits, our going along thoughtlessly with the mainstream, or simply our inherent laziness. But it is a plan that can only do us good when followed even for a short distance.

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