That’s often how the medical world sees it. But in reality, these two states—non-sick and healthy—are vastly different. Non-sickness is like simply surviving, as opposed to a healthy state of thriving. It is caused by eating an excess quantity of nutritionally barren food, which overworks the pancreas and facilitates your body’s storage of fat.

Non-sickness is a state in which your muscles become weak and flabby, a state of not enough sleep and way too much stress. It’s a state that leads you to progressive dependence on medications to relieve your symptoms—symptoms that are merely your body’s way of telling you you’re not healthy. Being non-sick often leads to life-threatening illness over time, as when excess weight eventually takes its toll and leads to metabolic syndrome. This state on the road to obesity is called pre-obesity—a more apt description of the corresponding negative health effects than the innocuous-sounding overweight.

In a state of non-sickness, time is against you. It may go unnoticed until one day you’re so fatigued that you finally go to your doctor and find out you have diabetes. Your health path has led you from non-sick to sick. The bad news is that close to 90 percent of us fall into this non-sick category. The great news is that the non-sick can usually reach optimal health in a relatively short amount of time.