The core of health is your lifestyle. It revolves around every little behavior in your lifestyle, such as how you wash your hands, how you brush your teeth, how you get sunlight, how you stand, how you sit, how you walk, how you drink and eat, and so on. What is it about these habits that make you healthy? How much impact can small behaviors have?

The most important principle of health is to take action. Action comes first. It is the simplest, but also the most important.

Health is not something you read about, it's not something you get from a check-up, a bottle or two of dietary supplements, or a stem cell treatment, and it's not something you get just because you have money and power, it is one of life's rare equalizers. Health is what you make of it.

Health is the accumulation of small behaviors in your daily life, the healthy actions you arrange for your family, the choices you make when you face health problems, all of these together are the health of your family.

What should I do if these healthy practices go against human nature? For example, in terms of exercise, we are required to have at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week, but I am an exercise novice, and the mere thought of exercise overwhelms me；another example is in terms of diet, we are required to have a reasonable structure of meat and vegetables in our meals, but I am a meat lover. In this case, these behaviors can be done once or twice, but how can one sustain them long-term?

Chances are, you'll have the same concerns as me. But don't worry, the solution is simple, action comes first. What I mean is, don't think about it so much, just do it the right way. If you can persist for a while, maybe one or two weeks, maybe 21 days, you will find that you will change the original preferences because of this behavior, but also change the mindset about this matter.

How can this happen? We tend to think that our brain consciousness has 100% decision-making power, what the brain tells us to do, we can only obediently obey. I have to like something and want to do something before I can do it. But the last 30 years of human brain science research have completely overturned this inertia.

Research found that only 1% of the things that pass through your cerebral cortex, through your mind to make a decision, are what? It's those higher-order things that you deliberately need to think about, such as which client to see today, which stock to buy, whether to prepare meeting materials or cut the film first, and so on. However, there are still 99% of the decisions, including which leg you walk on first, how you sit on the chair, what you want to eat today, and when you are tired or sleepy, these decisions do not even require you to think about them, they come naturally.

In other words, 99% of the decisions we make in our daily lives are not made by the conscious mind, the higher mind that originates in the cerebral cortex, but by the subconscious mind. Where do subconscious minds come from? Neurobiologically, they are decisions made below the cerebral cortex, including the brainstem, which is located in the center of the brain, and the limbic system, which is located in the outer layers. You can think of these parts as the primitive neural circuits of the brain that are not involved in your higher-order thinking but are involved in the most important activities of our lives, such as heartbeat, respiration, blood pressure, and control of your emotions, memories, and so on. These, in turn, shape most of the decisions you make about how you live your life.

These neural networks govern your body in ways that you can't decide, or more rigorously, that you can't decide all at once. This is why, today, you are determined to lose weight, you might manage light meals initially, but over time your body will not do, you want to run, after two days, your body is not willing to move.

So, there's nothing we can do about these neural networks? Of course not. Scientists in neurobiology and behavioral medicine have confirmed the same thing from different perspectives, that is, although these neural networks are not directed by your consciousness, they are closely connected to your body and can influence each other. On the one hand, they command the body, and on the other hand, the body's behavior can in turn influence the command. Take a simple example, you are used to walking with your left leg first, but if you let yourself walk with your right leg first every day, maybe after three months, the command ‘walk with your right leg first’ will be written into your neural network, and you will habitually walk with your right leg first after that. Of course, there are more complicated things, for example, if you want to change from a preference for rich flavors to a lighter taste, if you want to enjoy sports, if you want to sleep on time, all of these can be changed through the reverse pathway of changing the behavior first, and then remodeling the brain's command.

We would like to emphasize that the principle of action first is one of the most important aspects of health management. Health is not something you think about, it is something you do.