What Does It Mean To Be Healthy?
This seems like a silly question with obvious answers; be in shape, sleep enough, eat all the right food, and have a low amount of day-to-day pain, etc. But I've met people who are in shape, eat well, sleep an adequate amount, and move painlessly throughout their day, myself included. And healthy is not the word I would use to describe them.
There's a deeper question that needs to be uncovered. For what reason are you trying to be healthy?
From personal experience alone, I can honestly say that professed healthy behaviors motivated by shame, control, or any kind of oppressive emotion is not health at all. Health cannot simply mean what to do. It must also mean why are you doing it.
Over the past four years, (ten years if you count my wife's experience and mine together) I have seen people truly succeed and fail to keep their commitments. The difference between the person who keeps their commitments is not the one who does this the most. It's not the person who does the exact right amount of things. It's the person who has a significant enough why that it carries them through difficult periods of their life.
What is completely certain is that when you are trying to make healthy changes in your life, your life will try to “will” you away from them. You will get stressed, overwhelmed, tired, frustrated, and at some point question whether all of your work is worth it. It is in these moments where you will really have to ask yourself, “why am I doing this?” Healthy People Develop A Why.
Developing a why is the hardest part of making changes. The first reason it is difficult is because you already have a current why that is leading you to make the choices you are currently making.
The first step: Identify your own reasoning for not changing long term. Examples: I value being comfortable or uncomfortable. I don’t think the work will be worth it for me. I don’t think I could ever become healthy.
The second step: Nonjudgmentally, ask yourself, “why did I develop this way of thinking and reasoning?” (If you do not understand how you got to where you are, you are incredibly susceptible to falling right back in) One way of thinking about it is, if you don’t want to go to a place ever again, make sure you remember what it looks like and feels like to be there.
The third step: Begin developing a new why for behavior. One way you do this is by envisioning, without parameters, what kind of future life committing to new, healthy behaviors would provide you with.
Lee Ramsey has a passion for fitness as a way to help people grow and change into more adaptable, capable and resilient versions of themselves. He is owner of Sanctify Fitness in Covington and a regular fitness columnist for the NKyTribune.