What Does Healthy Mean to You?

Health is super nuanced and individual. You get to choose how you want to prioritize health in your own life. In this video, we discuss how to create our own definition of health, how to listen to our internal cues to prioritize health, how to assess our access to health promoting behaviors, and how to navigate conversations about your unique health with others. When we look internally instead of turning externally to define and prioritize health, we can feel fully aligned and confident in our decisions. We can tune out diet culture and tune out the hundreds of people trying to sell us garbage 'for our health'. It is extremely important to remember that our individual health is unique and nuanced. So we absolutely do NOT need to base our own health decisions off of other people.

1. Health is incredibly individual and nuanced

2. There is no moral superiority to being ‘healthy’

3. We can each prioritize health (and all aspects of our lives) in whatever way each of us wants to

   1. Consider one’s life’s goals and prioritize health in alignment with overall goals and preferences

   2. If you have different goals from someone else, you might prioritize health differently - and that’s 100% ok!

4. Create your own definition for ‘Healthy’ for yourself

   1. Decide which activities you want to consider health promoting activities

   2. Remember to keep your definition in alignment with your general life goals

5. Remember that each of us has different access to different health promoting activities

   1. Depending on where we live, the other obligations on our time, and our priorities our access to food, exercise, and healthcare will be different

   2. It’s very important for us to include access to healthcare (like preventative care and health screenings)

      1. Discussing only nutrition, exercise, sleep, and stress management without considering access to healthcare is ignoring a big piece of what makes up our toolkit of health promoting activities

6. Everybody has different obligations on their time and priorities which leads to each of us including our own health promoting activities in different ways

7. When we find ourselves in a conversation about health, we can take other’s individual definitions about health as a spark of curiosity, not judgement