Why Health Means Something Different to Everyone
Spend five minutes in any health forum and you’ll see people use the word health to mean wildly different things. For some, it’s about looking good in their clothing. For others, it’s a deeper, more metaphysical aspiration — feeling well, feeling capable, feeling whole.
As a conservative healthcare professional and athlete, I’ve spent decades reading, practicing, and debating health methods. And one thing is clear: we’re often not talking about the same thing at all.
Your Personal Definition of Health Matters
Is my approach to building and maintaining health the same as yours? Probably not. And that’s perfectly fine.
When it comes to health, we may need to accept that each of us must define it for ourselves. Your definition should reflect your goals, your lifestyle, and your values — not someone else’s checklist.
Once you have that definition, stick with it long enough to make meaningful progress.
Understanding Health Metrics: Why They Don’t Tell the Whole Story
Different Health Methods Produce Different Results
One reason people talk past each other is that they’re using different tools to pursue different outcomes. Consider a few major approaches:
- Natural methods — nutrition, sleep, movement, stress management
- Supplementation — targeted support for specific gaps or goals
- Pharmaceutical approaches — powerful interventions aimed at specific markers
These methods function independently. They don’t produce the same results, and they’re not meant to. Someone optimizing lab values will make different choices than someone trying to feel more energetic or improve body composition.
Understanding your own goals helps you choose the right tools — and the right health metrics to track.
Why Standard Health Metrics Often Fall Short
Take Body Mass Index (BMI), for example. It’s one of the most commonly used health metrics in allopathic medicine. It is convenient, easy to calculate, and simple to track. But for individuals trying to understand their own health, BMI is often misleading.
BMI doesn’t measure:
- Strength
- Metabolic flexibility
- Inflammation
- Resilience
- Body composition
It doesn’t tell you whether your lifestyle is working. It simply gives clinicians a number to monitor.
Western medicine loves numbers. It excels at drilling down into “bad” lab values because it has medications designed to change those numbers. But does changing a number automatically increase your health? They rarely say — and often cannot say.
This is why relying solely on traditional health metrics can give you an incomplete picture.
Better Ways to Assess Your Health Without Obsessing Over Metrics
Broad Assessments Can Be More Useful Than Narrow Ones
Walking is often prescribed because it’s simple, accessible, and beneficial for almost everyone. In the same way, your personal assessment of your health should be broad enough to capture what truly matters to you, not just what fits neatly into a chart.
Ask yourself if you:
- Feel capable?
- Recover well?
- Have energy for my daily life?
- Feel good in my body?
These questions often tell you more than a single health metric ever could.
Listen to Your Body — It’s Your Best Feedback System
At the end of the day, health is a lived experience, not a trend or a lab value.
Be good to yourself and those around you. Use your common sense to make lifestyle choices that benefit your body. Pay attention to the feedback your body provides — it is constantly communicating. Find what makes you feel capable, confident, and well.
And don’t worry about the latest fads in self‑care. Experiment if you enjoy it, keep what works, and discard what doesn’t. Your health journey is yours alone, and your definition of health should serve you — not the other way around.
“What drains your spirit drains your body. What fuels your spirit fuels your body.”― Carolyn Myss
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