Treat Your Body Like a High-Performance Vehicle

When I was in high school, I remember coming home one day completely exhausted and frustrated. I sat down with my father and started to cry. I couldn’t understand why I seemed to need so much more rest than everyone else.

Other people appeared to push through long days, sports practices, homework, and social lives without slowing down. Meanwhile, I felt like I constantly needed sleep, nourishment, hydration, and breaks just to keep up.

To a teenager, that felt like a weakness.

I remember asking him, “Why do I need so much more than everyone else?”

My father thought about it for a moment and then gave me an answer I have never forgotten.

He said, “Elizabeth, you’re a Ferrari.”

That caught my attention immediately.

He continued, “You don’t take a Ferrari to a regular car wash. There’s a guy who comes to your house and wipes it down with a baby diaper. You don’t put regular gas in it—you fill it with premium. And you definitely don’t leave it parked outside. You put it in a weatherproof garage.”

Then he paused and said something that stuck with me for the rest of my life:

“You have to treat a high-performance vehicle differently.”

Now, I should clarify something—we have never owned a Ferrari. Not even close. But the image was so vivid that it stayed with me. It gave me a new way to think about my body. Instead of seeing my need for recovery as a flaw, I began to see it as part of being built for performance.

High-performance systems require intentional care.

That idea has followed me throughout my life—from being a student athlete, to my exposure to elite training and recovery strategies in college, and eventually into my career as a physician.

Over the years, I’ve realized that most people are never taught how to care for their bodies the way high performers do. We tend to treat ourselves like basic transportation: run until something breaks, then try to fix the problem as quickly as possible.

But the human body doesn’t work well that way.

Recovery, healing, and long-term health depend on many small decisions: the shoes you wear, how much you sleep, how you manage inflammation, how you fuel your body, and how you respond when pain first appears.

When these factors work together, the body can heal remarkably well. When they are ignored, even small problems can linger and become chronic.

In my medical practice, I often see patients who are frustrated because they feel like they’ve tried “everything,” yet they’re still in pain. What is often missing isn’t effort—it’s understanding how all the pieces of recovery fit together.

My goal with my patients is to share the strategies, habits, and insights that help stack the deck in your favor when it comes to healing and performance.

The same principles that help athletes recover, train, and stay healthy can also help everyday people move through life with less pain and more confidence.

You don’t have to be an athlete to benefit from thinking about your body as a high-performance machine.

You just need to learn how to tune it properly.