I know several people who are beginning the quest for their natural health. Some of them are limiting their carbohydrates, some of them are trying to eat healthier oils. There are many paths to your future if you are just beginning to make small changes in your life. My path involved changing the way I shop and the things I drink at first. Your path may involve that and taking a fish oil pill every morning.

You may or may not have a companion on your journey. I did, but the journey that my companion took started years before mine did. She led me to this new leg of my journey by getting on the right track and I saw with my own eyes that change was possible, even if it was all alone. First she quit smoking. I tried that several years later and found out I could do it. Then she quit drinking. Without any help from me, she showed me that not drinking didn’t change anything that I loved about her, so after thinking about it for a very long time, I quit drinking too. She quit eating bread and flour products a couple of years ago, and I am not quite ready to do that yet, but I can see that in my future if the small changes I am making in my life right now don’t give me all that I am hoping they will.

The changes that I made were not me bravely doing what I needed to do. In my case, I was lucky that I had someone brave like that in my life. I could watch how it worked, see if it was easy or hard, learn how to break a habit by watching another person break a habit. Now, I know that I can break bad habits and make new ones.

If you don’t know that about yourself yet, there are lots of places out there offering you free advice. This is one of those places! My advice is truly free, since I am not selling you a pill that will magically help you, provided that you do all of the other things that I am advising you to do. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with taking a pill. A fish oil pill every morning is not bad for you. If it doesn’t actually do the chemical thing you are buying it for, that is not relevant at all. If it allows you to think that changing your life is possible, then take that pill. There are people (me, for instance) that don’t believe in the power of prayer–for me. Prayer may have power for you, though. If prayer keeps you trying to make the small changes, then you need prayer.

Dumbo, the cartoon elephant, needed a magic feather that would allow him to fly. As adults watching the cartoon, we all knew, way before Dumbo realized it, that he didn’t really need the feather. The feather gave him confidence to keep jumping off the platform. All along he had what he needed to make those jumps. I think that you have that, too. I think that if you make enough small changes in your life that you will realize that you don’t really need to pray, or take a pill, or watch someone important in your life do it first. But, for now, maybe you do need one or more of those things.

My little part is to give you daily doses of free advice. I will keep going and finding little things for you to watch out for, things that don’t work for everybody, ways that companies are trying to sneak the things back into your life that you are trying to quit, places where you can be encouraged to not fall off of the track you are on, the right track. We can do it, some of us alone, some of us together, with or without our magic feathers. The placebo effect is a real effect. It turns on something inside of you that has powers that science hasn’t yet nailed down. The results don’t really come from the pill all of the time. Sometimes, the results come straight from you.