Obligations as a health professional...

As a health professional, we have an obligation to ourselves and to our clients to be progressively developing and maintaining our own health and wellness psychologically, physically, and spiritually. We need to be well-rounded, balanced, and healthy. We cannot describe the picture of health we would like for our clients to be, if we infact do not live by our own rules, standards and suggestions. If we try to explain why our clients/patients should do this or that for their health, and we don't do it ourself, our words are invalid. If our recommendations don't work for us, they won't work for them.
It is like telling our clients not to drink soda or smoke a cigarette, but, they see us doing that same behavior on our break at the picnic table behind the building. We loose all credibility if that is the case. It would be an outrageous thing to do. All respect would fly away, be lost and they would think we were a hypocrite of the highest degree with no integrity whatsoever.
As a health professional, if we cannot walk the walk we ask our clients and patients to walk, then we need to go back to school, major in another profession, and change our occupation. Just go do a non-health profession in which it does not matter if we were eating sugary-candy-bars, junky-no-nutrition-snacks, and drinking sugary-soda kinda-job all day -- going down a heart-attack-hill, high-colesterol clogging bogging-us-down quick-sand road, cancer-causing, imbalanced-hormone-neurochemical-transmitting-hang-gliding out-of-wack, gastrointestionally complicated track, with an increased incidence of type 2 diabetes mellitus kind of imbalanced path that would not matter to our clients anyway. A path just like most people already choose. Why be different just join the crowd on the spiral downward sickness pit path.
No, no, no, a health professional needs to be different. A health professional needs to rise to the occasion, know where they are going, and where they should be headed, into the journey of the highest attainable health possible. Ever searching for better answers to life's quest for better health. In this journey, they travel far and wide, practicing and developing their own growth in all areas of psychological, physical and spiritual growth to effectively lead others the same way, telling the great success stories of vibrant health along the way to encourage and motivate and help others do the same. Health professionals need to live what they tell others to do, what is right and good for their health, what they know and will soon find out in their quest for better health journey.