Health As Something To Be Used: A Beginner's Guide

If you are just getting started with health as something to be used, the good news is that you do not need to change everything at once. The aim here is to keep things realistic and easy to sustain. Let's look at what actually matters with health as something to be used, and what you can safely ignore.

Start here

It helps to remember that there is a question that health advice rarely asks: what is the health for? A body maintained with great care and never used for anything has been preserved rather than lived in.

Give yourself room to be imperfect here; a missed day is an event, not a reason to give up.

The first easy step

Put simply, the question is not rhetorical. It has practical consequences for what a person trains, eats, and rests for. Someone who wants to walk in the mountains at seventy trains differently from someone who wants a particular appearance at thirty. Someone who wants to remain useful to their family attends to strength and cognition rather than to a number on a scale. Someone who wants to keep working at what they love attends to sleep and stress rather than to a supplement regime.

What matters most is fitting this around your real routine, so it becomes something you barely have to think about.

Building a little at a time

Put simply, having an answer also adjustments adherence. Abstract health — a diffuse sense that one ought to be healthier — motivates poorly. Concrete capability motivates well. Being able to carry a child on one's shoulders, to hike a specific route, to garden without pain, to sit on the floor and stand up again, to think clearly at the end of a long day: these are things a person can want, and wanting them makes the behaviours that produce them considerably easier to sustain. MedlinePlus, from the U.S. National Institutes of Health provides reliable, up-to-date information on this topic.

It helps to focus on what you can realistically do most days, rather than an ideal you can only manage occasionally.

What to expect early on

This also reframes the sacrifices. Going to bed early is not deprivation if it purchases a morning worth having. Cooking is not a chore if the meal is shared.

The goal is progress you can maintain, not perfection you have to chase and eventually abandon.

Simple habits to try

And it establishes a limit. When health practices begin to consume the very things they were meant to enable — the friendships, the meals, the travel, the spontaneity — they have exceeded their purpose. The instrument has become the object.

The goal is progress you can maintain, not perfection you have to chase and eventually abandon.

Keeping it going

Health is the condition of being able to do things. The things are the point.

Give yourself room to be imperfect here; a missed day is an event, not a reason to give up.

Practical tips

Here are a few easy places to start:

• Start small and stay consistent rather than aiming for a dramatic change.
• Anchor a new habit to something you already do each day, like your morning coffee.
• Ask for a little support from someone around you when you can.
• Give any change a few weeks before judging whether it is helping.

The bottom line

Take it one small step at a time. The best approach is the one you can keep going with. Start where you are and build slowly from there.