Living a healthy lifestyle - It's a personal matter!

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Have you ever wondered what "living a healthy lifestyle" actually means? Do you ever feel that there are unrealistic standards related to improving your health - or just downright confusion about how to improve your health?

Well, this article tackles a couple of the biggest barriers to actually getting going towards living a healthy lifestyle and experiencing the many joys of being healthy.

Currently, there are a couple of rather unrealistic concepts in society that make it extremely difficult to get started on improving your health and enjoying a healthy lifestyle.

The first idea is that there are certain, very specific things that define a healthy lifestyle, such as maintaining a certain weight or eating 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Those can be health goals, but they do not define what living a healthy lifestyle is.

The image below illustrates the four primary factors that contribute to living a healthy lifestyle:

Your personal decisions and choices on how you use them in your life are part of your lifestyle. See the article on healthy eating guidelines to learn how to make healthier food choices, for example.

I read an article on Medicinenet.com that blatantly accuses Americans of not leading a healthy lifestyle, because "...only 3% of American adults adhere to the four tenets of a healthy lifestyle defined in this study. This study confirms that compliance with public health recommendations is remarkably low among US adults..."¹

I don't know about you, but this irritates the hell out of me for several reasons. One, because there is no effective education on what the body needs to be healthy in the US, like HOW to maintain a "healthy weight with a body mass index (BMI) in the range of 18.5-25.0" - which is one of the four things that they define as living a healthy lifestyle.

This pompous, pretentious attitude oppresses a lot of people and is another barrier to being motivated to even learn how to improve your health. Stating that people who aren't maintaining a healthy weight, for example, are guilty of not living a healthy lifestyle is absurd when the facts are that the diet industry rakes in billions of dollars a year from folks who WANT to lose weight. Obesity is a national epidemic.

We can then conclude that that those who accuse us of "not living a healthy lifestyle" are the ones guilty of failure to help their patients with anything effective to achieve and maintain a healthy weight or other similar factors, like not smoking. (I smoked for 30 years and no doctor helped me to stop, ever!)

Crikey, when I read stuff like that, it sounds like we are bad, misbehaving dogs, peeing on the rug or something that we know we shouldn't do but do it anyway!

No wonder such a small percentage of us "pass muster..." We're not bad dogs! We do our best when we feel that we have the power of choice and our own self-determinism over our lives. The joys of being healthy are self-determined, not dictated by some "authority."

Living a healthy lifestyle is a matter of relative choices that you make, the choices being made on the basis of "more healthy or less healthy."

Improving your health is done on a gradient basis. The idea that if you don't get physical activity 30 minutes or more per day at least 5 times a week then you aren't living a healthy lifestyle is a false concept that prevents a lot of folks from even starting in my opinion.

For example, let's take a guy named Joe who leads a pretty sedentary (lack of physical activity) lifestyle. He decides to take a little walk at lunchtime to start incorporating some movement and stress management into his lifestyle. Let's say he starts out by taking a 5 - 10 minute walk at lunch maybe 3 times a week.

According to the definition of "healthy lifestyle" in the above study, Joe is guilty of not living a healthy lifestyle. How do you think Joe might feel if he was accused of that? That he might as well give up right now because it's not real yet for him to engage in physical activity for at least half an hour a day?

I beg to differ. By getting out for a bit of exercise and fresh air, maybe even noshing on an apple mid-morning instead of a doughnut, Joe is certainly living a healthier lifestyle than he was when he was sitting at his desk all day, scarfing down coffee and doughnuts for energy!

So the idea of rigid, "all-or-nothing" compliance to some arbitrary definition of "healthy lifestyle" is probably one of the most unrealistic and ineffective concepts to have if you really want to improve your health and enjoy the joys of being healthy. It isn't a matter of "healthy" or "not healthy." It's a matter of "more healthy" or "less healthy."

The unrealistic ideas that slow us down or prevent us in improving our health are just as important to discuss as going over the factors in living a healthy lifestyle themselves. When you subscribe to À Santé, the health and wellness newsletter of Improving Health and Energy, you'll open the door to useful, realistic help and discussion about how to improve your health.

Starting with the understanding that improving your health is something done gradiently, step-by-step instead of an all-or-nothing activity, you'll be actively living a more healthy lifestyle by tossing that stressful notion into the garbage!

How do you live a healthy lifestyle?

We are all unique in many ways, and our personal concept of what a healthy lifestyle for ourselves is part of that uniqueness. What's your opinion of the idea that a healthy lifestyle is following certain rules? What's really a healthy lifestyle for you? What things do you do that help you achieve that?

See more ways of living a healthy lifestyle:

Living a healthy lifestyle (whether it be eating or physical activity) is all about moderation  Your point taken!! I believe that it's all about being aware that the FDA in the US allows food manufacturers to fill our food with unnecessary and sometimes ...

Being free from infirmity or disease and feeling contented  I enjoyed reading your article as I have been subjected to exactly what you were talking about - by that I mean I have felt somehow we are all bad if we ...

Mostly vegetables and fruit, eight hours of sleep, and lots of movement!  I like to think I am healthy, and for the most part I am, but I find that there are always ways I can improve and BB lays it out nice and clear in the ...

Create a Balanced Lifestyle  What a wit you have B.B.! Everyone needs to create a balanced lifestyle depending on their own unique circumstances. It isn't one size fits all.

And ...

Eating foods and using my body in ways that don't damage my health, but improve it.  This page is a fine addition to a website with a unique approach to how stuff happens and how to deal with things individually.

I think that maintaining ...

Understanding and dealing with changes in the body as it ages so you can play the game of life  A healthy life style is subjective. If you are talking about the physical body only, then you have to understand that the genetics of each body is different ...

Living a healthy lifestyle means first managing stress  I'll try to paint you a little picture of my concept of a healthy lifestyle - a "healthy lifestyle" meaning "living life in a way that promotes physical ...

Always Feeling Healthy by "Going Green"  My ideal healthy lifestyle is to go green. The many aspects of going green all lead to increased health. Here are a few that affect me, for the better....

Use healthy ingredients for cooking from scratch, schedule downtime into my day.  I try to cook foods and not rely on store-bought quick meals as much as possible. I bake bread
and snacks for my family from whole grains, cook with ...

Eating healthy, meaning cutting out the fast food and salt where ever possible  A healthy lifestyle for ME would mean getting off my lazy butt and exercising.
I talk a good game about being healthy because I eat healthy. But exercise ...

Looking for a realistic, down-to-earth health and wellness newsletter? When you subscribe to À Santé! (which means "To Health!) you'll find: Written in "plain English" with useful health basics and practical "how-to" information so you can absorb the information easily and actually use it to improve your own health. One simple but powerful feature per issue so you can focus on one aspect of improving your health at at time - instead of feeling overwhelmed or confused and doing nothing as a result! Articles that discuss how to improve health instead of just preaching at you about what you should do... (Don't you hate that?) What's your purpose for improving your health and energy? Living a better quality of life? Subscribing to À Santé! can help you reach those health goals. For more information about this practical health newsletter, visit the "health and wellness newsletter" page on this site. Subscribe to À Santé! ("to health!) today and receive a special report on instant relaxation exercises that are simple and fast to use when you need a physical and mental health boost!

E-mail First Name Your e-mail address is confidential. It will only be used to send you À Santé! ~ B.B. Martin Editor

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¹http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=46947 accessed on June 20, 2009.

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