You can also check out this episode on Spotify! If you’re anything like Dr. McBride or her patients, you want to live a long life. You want to be healthy! Yet when you try to execute on your best intentions—whether it’s cutting back on alcohol, starting an exercise routine, or taming your phone addiction—you end up defaulting to factory settings.Well, you are not alone.The pandemic laid bare how wired and tired we are—and how desperate we are to feel better. We scroll endlessly online for wellness advice and health hacks. We grab quick hits of dopamine through sugar, shopping, booze, or whatever gizmo social media is offering up. We are sleepless and irritable and don’t know what’s wrong.The U.S. medical industrial complex is failing people. The wellness industry is fleecing people. How do we get ourselves “unstuck” when we don’t know what questions to ask or who to trust?Dr. McBride argues that first, we must first redefine “health” as more than a set of laboratory tests or a single visit to the doctor. To her, health is a process, not an outcome. Health is about having awareness of our medical data, acceptance of the things we cannot control, and agency over the things we can control.She calls this the “Three As.” She argues that articulating our Three As allows us to more accurately tell our story. An honest reckoning with the Three As can put us back in the driver’s seat of our health. In this week’s (short!) solo podcast, she explains this in more detail. She defines each “A” and suggests a way to move through this process on your own. Spoiler alert: getting healthier isn’t particularly sexy. It’s often not very fun. It usually isn’t usually quick, and it never involves a “fix.” In reality, staring down the facts, accepting hard truths, and then challenging our beliefs and our everyday behaviors is arguably the deepest and hardest work we do. Our stories live in our bodies. What’s yours?Join Dr. McBride every Monday for a new episode of Beyond the Prescription.You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or on her Substack at https://lucymcbride.substack.com/podcast. You can sign up for her free weekly newsletter at lucymcbride.substack.com/welcome.Please be sure to like, rate, review — and enjoy — the show!The full transcript of the show is here!Dr. McBride: Hello, and welcome to my home office. I'm Dr. Lucy McBride, and this is Beyond the Prescription. Today, it's just you and me. Every other week this season, I'll talk to you like I do my patients, pulling the curtain back on what it means to be healthy, redefining health as a process of self-awareness, acceptance, and agency.[00:00:28] In clinical practice for over 20 years, I have found that patients generally want the same things. A framework to evaluate their risks, access to the truth and data, and tools and actionable information to be healthy, mentally and physically. We all want to feel more in control of our health. Here, I'll talk to you about how to be a little more okay tomorrow than you are today. Let's go.[00:00:55] So today it's just you and me. I am pretty excited, because I get to talk to you the way I talk to my patients. Specifically today, we're going to talk about how we might approach the process of getting healthier. If you're anything like me or my patients, you want to live a long life, right? You want to be healthy, you want to feel good, and you probably know that there's some things you could do to be healthier, but you find them hard to do, and you default to factory settings on a day-to-day basis.[00:01:30] Well, you're not alone. Many of us aspire to get more exercise, to eat better, to get more sleep, to manage stress. In other words, we all want to do what our doctor tells us to do, but when the rubber meets the road, it's actually pretty darn hard. So how do we actually get healthier? How do we mind that gap between our best intentions and the execution part?[00:01:53] So let's first talk about definitions like, the definition of hea