THE BEST OF LIVING WELL LOCALLY

Plus, a look ahead at 2025 and a reminder of how important WE ALL are in creating a healthy America.

Living Well Locally (LWL) looks back over two years of envisioning personal wellness as a driver for regenerative agriculture and lifestyle medicine at the local level. And we look ahead to a year of continuing to build on that vision.

So far, we have described LWL as ‘place-based wellness’, explained why it is so needed in resolving America’s chronic disease epidemic, and explored how the vision is made possible now by new regenerative methods in medicine and farming. We also discussed the two things most needed to give the vision life: encouraging regenerative farmers and practitioners by using their services and valuing the home tenders who will make it possible to re-inhabit the American home in new and powerful ways.

By keeping food and wellness dollars local, LWL envisions rebuilding local economies while reversing chronic disease, with the side benefits of helping restore local ecosystems and reducing toxic exposures. The key players are clinics, homes, and fields in service to place-based communities, especially those that have taken health as an economic strategy. (This basic vision will expand to include other players such as schools which can play a key role in saving children’s health.)

In clinics, lifestyle-based medicine is proving itself capable of going beyond prevention to reversing chronic disease. Most notable are Terry Wahls, MD; Dale Bredesen, PhD; and Dean Ornish, MD who have proven their lifestyle protocols in clinical trials, although many other holistic practitioners are also changing lives every day. Once drugless medicine enters primary care, medical options will exist for patients who want to treat the root causes of illness before it comes chronic.

In fields, regenerative farmers are providing the nutrient-dense, toxin-free foods that clinics need for healing (RFGM), and community food webs are emerging as the base for restoring local economies. The LWL vision suggests that agriculture’s first question should be ‘what makes humans healthy?’ The answer, we suggest, is ‘real, local food’ grown without chemicals.

In homes, healing kitchens and home tenders are the essential connection between clinic and field. Good care of self and home changes everything. By cooking high-quality, real food and removing environmental toxins, our homes are on their way to becoming places of real healing, including being brain healthy for all who live there. Because creating healing homes requires knowledgeable and dedicated home tenders, we also wrote about role equity.

Along the way we shared personal stories, honored the brilliance of the human body, began setting out action steps for change, and even noted the absence of questions about chronic disease, wellness, and local economies in political debates. We encouraged readers to think about how dependent we Americans have become on things outside of ourselves, especially essentials like food and medicine from providers who don’t live anywhere near us and have no interest or investment in our communities.

We began LWL by using our home state of Mississippi as an example of the perfect storm of 1) need for reversing chronic disease, and 2) opportunity for taking health as an economic strategy. This is a focus we will continue from time to time with the hope that our first boots-on-the-ground pilot project will be here. In this season of national focus on Making America Healthy Again (MAHA), we are hopeful such might happen. America needs to see examples of what place-based wellness can do, especially under our free enterprise system and when a free people are encouraged to see self-care as a patriotic act.

In 2025, we will be focusing on children’s health, describing the local wellness economy, exploring what it means to be (and remain) a ‘natural’ human, and following the progress of MAHA. Needless to say, we are hopeful but realistic about the politics involved in MAHA, as well as the paradigm shifting that will be required.

Voices (ours and yours) from the grassroots will be important in the political fights ahead, so please communicate with your elected officials and watch their votes. Yet, what will be at least equally important are the consumer dollars we spend in the marketplace. Put down the PopTarts and Cheerios and pick up the pastured eggs and butter. If we don’t buy it, they won’t make it. Our consumer dollars are our voices to the powerful forces that shape our daily lives.

Learn what is healthy and what is not, sharpen your discernment skills, and by all means, don’t give up. In this trial-and-error phase of finding wellness, know that your body is the most truthful guide you will ever have. Learn to listen carefully for its wisdom.

If you can afford to do so, work with a holistic, lifestyle-based practitioner, especially someone who can test for the specific toxins that are making you or your children sick. We need an army of these drugless clinicians and the only way currently to have more of them is to seek them out and use their services to whatever extend our budgets allow. One day they will be mainstream and part of primary care, and insurance will reimburse for their services. When that happens America will enter a new era, one where the best of trauma and rehabilitative care will merge with the best care for healing chronic disease.

Living Well Locally will continue to envision a better future as we honor the wisdom of Socrates: “The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.”

Yet and still, we are grateful to those who are fighting the good fight against tyranny, censorship, world hunger, medical mandates, and harms against children’s health and humanity’s future. Uncertainty has marked the past five years of pandemic experience, and as the world heads into 2025, we are still learning, still sorting through the confusion in expert opinions, and still weighing the decisions we must make on a daily basis for our families. Stay alert, stay open, stay aware. As a voter and consumer, and especially as a patient, you and your family hold the keys to creating something better.

We welcome you to join us in focusing on a future of good health in our homes and communities . . . the best of which comes, we believe, with living locally in place-based wellness that we ourselves have created.