Yesterday I received an email from a person who felt a little down from their lack of size. I get these types of emails everyday now and for most of them I don’t answer because it would take too much out of me in terms of energy and time if I had to respond to every one of these emails.
What I decided to do is to copy that email of the sender below and also copy my general message to this person, who I am guessing is a guy. To make sure that this person’s online privacy is intact, I will refer to this person by their intitials only, J.T.
The first section was his email to me. The 2nd section was my email in response to his email.
Hi Michael,
Thanks for all the valuable information on your website. Its really helpful.
My name is J & I am 29 years old standing 5.7 inches. Like everyone else even I have been trying to grow tall at least an Inch as I know its not possible to grow any further at this age. I had been tall during my teens but got into light weight lifting, dips & squats when I was in my teens. After that my growth stopped or was very negiligible. My younger brother was around 5 to 6 inches shorter than me at that time and is 2 inches taller than me now. My dad is 5.5 & mom is 5.25 inches tall.
I had been very active during my teens with cycling, playing & hanging & really feel bad that I couldnt grow any taller or my growth stopped too early. I did lot of exercies & used Yoko as well but it didnt help. Its really depressing now as I am touching 30 & there is no hope of any growth. I have seen lot websites which offer money back offers on their products like supplements, books & even seen a yearly subscribtion guide who guarantees growth for all ages. I am sure most of these do not offer any results in reality but just need to know if there is any hope or any substance in any of these offers so that I can at least grow an Inch taller.
Thanks for your help.
Regards,
J.T.
J,
I get emails like the one that you sent everyday. Most of the emails I don’t answer. Since your email is more honest, personal, and sad than others , I wanted to sent to you a longer, more extensive, email which I will use for all emails after this one. At the height that you gave, you are below average in height for adult males if you live in the USA. In other countries you might actually be average, or even slightly on the tall side.
The truth is that there are some things that you can do to increase your height. Stretching, rolfing, going to the chiropractor, traction, all done to decompress the disks in the vertebrate. There is also minimal invasive surgical ideas for your feet and head that are available but the increases are around only 1 inch of increase.
The only one that is currently accepted by medical professionals and guaranteed to give you extra height after you have reached natural bone maturity will involve surgery, where your bones will have to be distracted. Everything else can give you at most around 1 inch of extra height.
The technology is just not there yet for an alternative to the limb lengthening surgery, but there is one idea that I realize could work, which could take around 20 years to implement from the initial breakthrough in proof of concept to actual implementation by physicians and surgeons in the medical clinics around the world. It involves a combination of stem cell implantation combined with the tissue engineering technology. The research on the website actually proved that it could definitely work, at least in lab animals. Fully functional growth plates have been grown in the lab.
The Psychological Aspect Of The Issue
The problem with the issue of height is that it is one of the only things that we have almost no control of, no matter how hard we try. Most things in life, we can change and make better if we worked insanely hard for it consistently with commitment. If you are a person who failed high school, you can still become a surgeon if you worked insanely hard and applied yourself for 15 years. So most of the problems we have in life we can correct.
At some deep level, I think you realize that if you really wanted the height, you can get it, through the surgical method. It might take you 10 years of hard work, saving enough money for the operation, planning, and research and then another 1-2 years of painful physical therapy to get the extra 3-4 inches that we all wish for, but 99.99% of people who wish to be taller don’t want to be taller that badly where they are willing to do ANYTHING, and whatever it takes. However, for that 0.01% of people, they want it that badly, that desperately where they will go through with it. So do you want the increase in height that badly? is it a real MUST for you? Or is it a wish, a prayer, a hope and desire, which is not followed by insane action and dedication?
If you think about it, there are many things in the world, and in the universe that we have no control over, like the weather, occurence of cancer, aging itself, the inevitability of death. However, for most of these things, people don’t get too depressed about. Why? I guess it is because it happens to everyone at the same level or rate.
What I can tell you is that for most people, we are not really frustrated that we might be short or that there is almost nothing we can do about it, or that we are of a certain height. What is really going on is that we are comparing ourselves to other people similar to us, like our brother, our friends, our peers and notice that they are bigger than us. As human beings, we don’t actually judge many things through absolute terms, but in terms of relative values. We feel bad that we are 5′ 7″ because it seems that everyone else around us is 5′ 11″ or over 6 feet and we think that because they are taller than us, maybe that also means that they are at some intrinsic level ‘better’ than us.
If there was some other way that you could feel better about your self, then you probably wouldn’t have the problem of feeling insecure or sad about your height. If you are 5′ 7″ but have an IQ of 155 and a mathematics prodigy while the rest of the people around you are over 6 feet tall but have average intelligence, you would subconsciously latch on the fact that you are smarter than the people around you to give you an inner locus of confidence, to make your own ego rationalize why you are ‘better’ than other people. As long as you can link/ associate your own self image to something which you feel proud of and have confidence in, you would feel better and not worry about your size, because that would be a part of your identity which you place no value or importance in. It may surprise you but there are a lot of people in the world shorter than you who are completely happy with their height (even men) because they judge their own self worth through some other standard or value system.
If It would help, I would suggest one of the greatest self help books ever published “Psycho-Cybernetics“ by Dr. Maxwell Maltz. The book focuses on how you can change your self image of yourself to gain more confidence and happiness in your life. It is available through the link on Amazon for less than $7. I am an affiliate of Amazon Associates so I get a small commission if you buy the book through the link above.
Note: This unconscious drive to constantly be comparing ourselves to other people is inherent in almost all culture that stresses the individual and competition, if not being completely universal in human kind.
I am reminded of the quote “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet”. There are definitely a lot of people in this worse off than us. If one is 5′ 7″, one can always find someone else that is 5′ 6″. If we can’t be the type of person we wish to be, it still might be reasonable to find a tall or taller mate to be with to have taller children. I would like to present to you the life of a very inspirational man Sean Stephenson, a guy who suffers from a rare genetic condition known as Osteogenesis Imperfecta, which makes him only 3 feet tall, and confined to a wheelchair. I wrote about him in one of the earliest post for the website at the link below.
http://www.naturalheightgrowth.com/2012/07/31/sean-stephenson-3-foot-giant-in-a-wheelchair/
I also wrote about Nick Vijivic…
http://www.naturalheightgrowth.com/2012/08/02/nick-vujicic-how-to-live-an-inspired-life-without-limbs/
If you are worried at some level that being shorter means that you can’t meet a great partner, gf or bf, then you would be wrong. Both Nick and Sean are married to great women and their physical limitations did not limit them. It is interesting to note that some of the greatest men in History like Jesus and Alexander the Great were both below average in height for people in their time. The point is to show that your below average in stature will not stop you from finding success in either your professional life or personal life, from finding the right person to marry or getting the prestigious job.
In The End…
Me and Tyler are working on the research and hoping to at least make the best website on the internet on this subject. Even if in the end we don’t achieve the real goal, at least we made the internet a better place.
Look, we all go through immense pain in life. You must have heard of the phrase “life is not fair”. I am doing this entire thing because I was coming from a place of immense pain. I chose to focus on doing great things and making things better and taking immense action. I hope you can take something from this email. The least that I can hope for is that you can look at your situation differently and feel a little better of what you do have, and show you that you are not limited by your body.
Take care,
Michael