Living Healthy – An Exploration

I will never be 6 feet tall. I will never have a thick head of hair and I am pretty sure that I will never be able to do a split. Those are my genetics and I cannot do anything to alter them. Science has come a long way, and certain traits that were considered permanent can now be changed. Boobs can be added and taken away. Eye color, hair color, skin color, nose shape, body fat, wrinkles, all have lost any semblance of permenance these days. It is even possible to give a baseball pitcher a faster fastball through surgery.

What is permanent? Ignoring the changes that we can affect through medicine, the condition of our body has limits that we can never move beyond. When you straighten your arm, there is a point that your elbow will not move past. That is a physical limitation that is more or less written in bone.

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A few months ago, I begin to do some serious digging into healthy living. By the typical American’s standards, I was already living healthy, but if you look around you will see that those standards are set quite low. While I was satisfied with my lifestyle, relatively speaking, I was curious what else was out there. I have heard lotsa talk about vegetarianism, yoga, meditation, organics and local foods, etc. but did not know anything about the true benefits (if any) to adding these components to my life.

The more I dug, the more confused I became: There are few clear cut answers to these complicated questions. Some of the basics are obvious – avoid sugars and fats; processed foods are not as healthy as natural foods; being a couch-potato is bad for you. But fine-tuning a lifestyle can be overwhelming – Should I be eating NO sugars or fats (boring!), if a food comes in a bag, is it considered processed, what kind of exercise is best?

The only solid answer I have been able to find so far is that if you ask someone for their advice, they will guide you towards their own lifestyle, but really this should come as no surprise. A vegetarian will tell you that eating meat is essentially poisoning your body. An omnivore (eats flora and fauna) will tell you that our bodies require meat. A body-builder will tell you that lifting weights is healthy and a yogi will tell you that high-impact exercise will destroy your body.

Returning to the question, ‘What is a healthy lifestyle,’ what is the answer? If there were an easy answer, I am sure we would have found it already and there would be no need for debate. Since we are still disagreeing, I suspect that the answer is elusive, possibly even subjective. I don’t expect to someday, be able to state emphatically, ‘Ah, to live a healthy lifestyle I only need to ________!’ But hopefully I will be able to learn a bit and possibly make some educated decisions instead of making decisions based on ignorance like I have been most of my life.