#cleaneating, #healthyliving, #gymlyfe, #whatdoesallthisevenmean?
Growing up as an extremely competitive swimmer with eleven practices a week that added up to roughly thirty hours spent in the pool or weight room, I developed a slightly intense and almost extreme attitude towards health. In the world of swimming, I came to understand health as a strict diet of clean foods, an intense exercise regime that involved two workouts a day, and deciding to generally forgo a social life in order to allow my body to adequately rest and recover.
Competitive sports leads to a different and almost insane attitude towards what it means to be healthy; it means constantly pushing our bodies and minds to lift more or eat cleaner or to swim just a little faster every single day. I was not particularly concerned about the definition of health while I was swimming, but I understood that I was an extremely healthy and fit individual, especially compared with the rest of the population. And then I quit. After I quit swimming towards the end of high school, I carried that same intense attitude about health, exercise and food into the ‘real’ world because it is hard to let go of just under a decade’s worth of thinking. I knew that my notions of being healthy were extremely high and nearly unattainable, but I could not fathom another way of being healthy other than what I had learned in swimming.
Around four years have gone by since I quit swimming so the rigidity surrounding my health rules has loosened, but I still carry a level of intensity about health. Instead of constantly trying to attain the same level of health as an Olympian, now I tend to go through phases of being really healthy like only eating grilled chicken breasts and green juice while training for an Iron Man to phases of being really unhealthy like binge watching Real Housewives of Beverly Hills while eating cheese puffs and Airheads off my stomach.
green juice and my fitbit… obviously one of my healthy phases
Maybe not that extreme, but my attitude towards health has generally relaxed. My life has revolved around health. I learned at an early age what it meant to be healthy in terms of competition. I also learned at an early age what it means to be healthy through diet because of my family’s severe food allergies. But, it wasn’t until much later in my life that I came across the Eastern way of thinking about health, which is the trifecta of complete health of mind, body and spirit. This approach is my personal attitude towards the meaning of being healthy. One of my favorite yogis, B.K.S Iyengar, stated “health is a state of complete harmony of the body, mind and spirit. When one is free from physical disabilities and mental distractions, the gates of the soul open” (Iyengar). While my personal attitude and philosophy towards health has evolved, the actual concept and idea of health is still unclear and puzzling.
Health is a confusing topic in the United States. Talk to one American and his definition of being healthy may be having six-pack abs and huge biceps. While talk to another person in the United States and her definition might be to easily flow through the entire of Primary Series in Ashtanga Yoga. However, maybe talk to some people from Uganda and their concept of health does not revolve around of those concepts. In the Western world, a woman with a medium to large amount of body fat is considered unhealthy whereas in other places around the world, high body fat may indicate the ability to survive famine, natural disasters and even childbirth. These different ideas all lead to the question—what is health? Is health a purely physical state of being or does it encompass mental and emotional states as well? Because theories of health differ between cultures, countries (even within the same comparative culture) and genders, there is no truly concrete, universal idea of health. The word health is even difficult to describe with the basic dictionary definition claiming that health is the state of being free from injury and disease. The World Health Organization defines health as a “state of complete social, psychological, and physical well-being” (Allen pg. 12). This definition allows room for cultural relativism to enter into the discussion of health. Cultural relativism emphasizes, “a general tolerance and respect for difference, which refers to the idea that cultural context is critical to an understanding of people’s values, beliefs and practices… [and] deny that any standpoint is uniquely privileged over all others” (Howson pg. 2). If health and cultural relativism exist in the same conversation then the topic of health becomes even more convoluted and confusing. So if the concept of a healthy individual changes throughout culture, this offers a new type of fluidity to health that has not been traditionally discussed. Medical News Today even throws another idea into the discussion surrounding health by bringing up the term wellness, which is defined as “a state of optimal well-being that is oriented toward maximizing an individual’s potential. This is a life-long process of moving towards enhancing your physical, intellectual, emotional, social, spiritual, and environmental well-being” (Medical News Today)
Throughout this semester, I want to explore the different aspects of health—physical, mental and spiritual across different cultures, but with a focus on American culture. During my observations, I want to attempt to understand why health has such a broad and global meaning, especially if all humans are 99% the same genetic code. If health is a cultural phenomenon then which cultures have a deeper and better understanding of health? The idea of the quintessential healthy individual has become distorted into Instagram pictures of skinny girls attempting to sell the latest juice diet or fitness book.
when did this become the ideal image of american health?
american ideal of women’s health.
American health has become a book of blanket generalizations that should not and cannot apply to every person. Americans no longer view an average looking person as healthy; we long ago traded that image in for the now preferred image of a Photoshopped fitness model or the super shredded Hollister dude. What happened to our idea of health? Did Americans ever have one to begin with or have we deluded ourselves into thinking that modern medicine and technology are one in the same as health? Health is a complex and interesting concept with no clear definition or method of approaching it.
Works Cited
Howson, Alexandra. “Cultural Relativism.” EBSCO Research Starters. EBSCO, 2009. Web.
Iyengar, B.K.S. Light on Yoga: Yoga Dipika. New York: Schocken, 1979. Print.
Nordqvist, Christian. “What Is Health? What Does Good Health Mean?.” Medical News Today. MediLexicon, Intl., 1 Jul. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015. Web.
Wiley, Andrea S., and John S. Allen. Medical Anthropology: A Biocultural Approach. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Print.