Healthy Goal Setting
A couple of years ago when I was setting my annual goals, I decided that one of my objectives that year, was to be healthy. However, I couldn’t work out how to define healthy so that it was a measurable goal. After all, if I can’t measure how healthy I am, I can’t know how to improve it. For example, I can measure how much fruit and vegetables I eat daily so I know when I am eating enough.
When setting my goal of getting healthy, did I mean physical fitness, mental contentment, or not being ill? Perhaps my goal was to eat healthily, building stronger social connections, or get enough sleep? Well, yes, all of these are important as I generally feel more positive when I get outside every day, have a good night’s sleep, and spend time with friends. These are essentially my self-care acts; giving me the energy to do my daily work tasks and thus the satisfaction of doing a good job on my writing or on a client’s project.
“if I can’t measure how healthy I am, I can’t know how to improve it.”
How can I determine if I am healthier without defining healthy?
The conundrum around the definition of healthy so I can measure it, made me realize that our definition of health food and healthy eating are also be dependent on our personal goals. Our perception of what it means to eat healthily varies depending on our needs and requirements at that moment. For example, young children require different foods to adults and the elderly. Additionally, I know that my food intake requirements change depending whether my work is physically demanding or sedentary. On the days I go for a long hike, I need food with more energy than the days I sit on the sofa.
It isn’t just calorie intake that changes either. I’ve noticed that when it is warm outside, I want to eat more salads and colder temperature foods and in winter I tend to eat hearty stews and soups. This is particularly noticeable at the moment as we are having an early warm spring. I am happily eating lots of salads and freezing the soups I made when it was cold last week.
“Our perception of what it means to eat healthily varies depending on our needs and requirements at that moment.”
Defining Health
The simplest definition of health is that it is the absence of illness and infirmity. This binary essentially means that if you are not ill or in pain, you are healthy. However, illness and pain are not binary. We have ways to measure the degrees of illness, which leads to other problems of valuing different illnesses and different people’s illness leading to inequity of treatment.
Brüssow1 explains that if health is treated by the medical experts as the absence of disease or infirmity it suggests that:
“Overall, one gets the impression that medicine deals with disease and not health.”
He also suggests that this means that the National Institutes of Health, would be better named in this case as the National Institutes of Disease as they look at ways we get ill rather than how we can stay well.
This also means that treatment emphasizes cures rather than prevention as we visit doctors when we feel unwell. I have yet to visit my doctor because my health isn’t 100%.
The Merriam Webster dictionary2 has three definitions for how Americans regularly use the word health:
The condition of being sound in body, mind, or spirit//the general condition of the body
A condition in which someone or something is thriving or doing well// general condition or state
A toast to someone's health or prosperity
The first two definitions define health as more than physical fitness or as an absence of illness and, while they might not be measurable at the moment, I feel they could be once I define what I mean by “being sound in body, mind and spirit”. How do we measure if we are thriving?
Others suggest that health is the ability to adapt and self-manage or perhaps being well enough to contribute to your community. These suggests that health is a subset of resilience. Thus, our ability to adapt to our environment and its limitations, and support our community, shows how healthy we are.
These definitions ignore the effect of outside influences on our health. Many people living in poorer housing, for example, are ill due to environmental contamination, or mold in their houses, or the lack of social interaction because streets are unsafe. These facts are important when it comes to being healthy.
This has been understood by public health experts for a long time and in 1948 when the World Health Organization was founded, health was, and still is, defined as:
“A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.3”
This definition is very idealistic and to become healthy we really do have to consider our physical, mental and our emotional health as well as that of the environment we live in. After all, being healthy is not only an individual responsibility. It is all very well for me to be healthy but what good does that do if the health of my friends, neighbors and community is poor?
The WHO definition is criticized by some as being unattainable and for setting impossible goals to meet if we want to be healthy. For example, when I use this definition of health, I am rarely healthy. Does this mean I am unwell most of the time? But I don’t feel ill!
Is it even possible for us to agree on a definition of health?
As there are so many different ways of looking at health, it is hard to know who can I trust when it comes to health advice. As we saw in last week’s article on Nutrition Tips4, people manipulate their advice to sell products, and defining health appears to be no exception.
What is your definition of health? How do you know if you are healthy?
I write about the intersection of food science and food systems with an emphasis on food safety, food justice and resilience. I am concerned that climate disasters and changing weather patterns are affecting our ability to eat healthy nutritious food.
I run a food safety consultancy, Food Safety Mid Atlantic, which I started in 2018 to support small and mid sized food businesses with food safety and product development. I support clients to develop a robust food safety program and to scale up their businesses while allowing them to maintain integrity with their values.
My primary goal is to support my clients so they make food at cost that is safe, tasty and compliant with federal, state, and local regulations.
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Brüssow, H. (2013), What is health?. Microbial Biotechnology, 6: 341-348. https://doi.org/10.1111/1751-7915.12063
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/health
https://www.who.int/about/governance/constitution