What Is Healthy Deviance?

Watch and learn …

Healthy Deviance is a Different Way of Being

Healthy Deviance is the renegade art of being healthy in an unhealthy world.

It involves a series of revolutionary shifts in perspective and practice that empower you to stay energized and anti-fragile in a society where, sadly, most people are either stuck in a downward spiral or just getting by.

It starts with mastering the Nonconformist Competencies and Renegade Rituals that help you escape the traps of our Unhealthy Default Reality — and then help others find their way out, too.

Good Reasons to Depart from the Status Quo

In my book, The Healthy Deviant, I lay out detailed statistics and explanations for the chart below. but just glancing at this little snapshot one thing is clear:

If you are currently a healthy, happy person in today’s United States, you represent a small, fast-shrinking minority.

>> You are, statistically speaking, an endangered species.

Here’s how the status quo is looking right now …

“If you are currently a healthy, happy person in today’s United States, you represent a fast-shrinking minority.”

— Pilar Gerasimo

Getting Past Normal

So what kind of society makes being health and happy so difficult that only a single-digit percentage of its population can hope to pull it off? A sick society.

And within a sick society, what does it mean to be one of the few who bucks the odds? It means that you have to be prepared to resist your society’s standard way of doing business. You have to defy a lot of its rules and conventions. You have to make a lot of inconvenient and unpopular choices.

Being a healthy person in an unhealthy world requires outwitting the crazy that passes for normal.

It requires evading the vitality-sapping grip of what I call our “Unhealthy Default Reality.”

The Unhealthy Default Reality is that combination of automatic choices and dominant social norms that make unhealthy choices vastly easier to make than healthy ones. It’s also the counterproductive, crazy-making influence of the conventional weight-loss industry and bloated sick-care system that our unhealthy culture has spawned.

Outsmarting the Unhealthy Default Reality is easier said than done, but it is also wildly worth doing. The Healthy Deviant explains how. It shows how a small but growing number of bright-spot outliers are managing to beat the unhealthy odds — and how you can, too.

Embracing Healthy Deviance requires coming to terms with your present circumstances while simultaneously defining yourself as a sovereign individual. It means choosing to be animated rather than oppressed by the unhealthy default choices that surround you.

That’s the Healthy Deviant Way. And while not an instant fix, it actually works a whole lot faster and more reliably than most health-improvement strategies that promise instant results. It’s also a whole lot more fun.