Am I Healthy?

That's really where it all started. A simple question. My loose thread. Am I healthy? 3 words-- and they aren't complex words... they are the kinds of words you learn when you are in elementary school.


So I started to think about trying to define the word healthy. How hard could that be? I went to the dictionary.

Healthy
ADJECTIVE: Inflected forms: health·i·er, health·i·est
1. Possessing good health.
2. Conducive to good health; healthful: healthy air.
3. Indicative of sound, rational thinking or frame of mind: a healthy attitude.
4. Sizable; considerable: a healthy portion of potatoes; a healthy raise in salary.

I hate it when words define themselves using themselves. Take 2:

Health
NOUN:
1. The overall condition of an organism at a given time.
2. Soundness, especially of body or mind; freedom from disease or abnormality.
3. A condition of optimal well-being: concerned about the ecological health of the area.
4. A wish for someone's good health, often expressed as a toast.

Two basic things stood out for me here. "Optimal well-being" and "freedom from disease or abnormality." Let me start out with optimal well-being. How do we know what optimal well-being even is? So I poked around more:

Well-being
SYLLABICATION: well-be·ing
PRONUNCIATION: wlbng
NOUN: The state of being healthy, happy, or prosperous; welfare.

Again, more of that defining things in a circle. And now in my circle of well-being=health=well-being I needed to figure out how to optimize that.

So I went back to the "freedom of disease or abnormality." I wasn't too keen on the idea of defining health as the absence of disease because disease in and of itself is so elusive. Think about diseases that show no symptoms-- are we saying the person is healthy? No. If cancer is brewing but not symptomatic yet, a person isn't healthy. And sometimes you can just feel that you aren't healthy but there aren't a lot of symptoms of a disease there-- like mornings when getting out of bed just plain sucks and your body aches. Clearly not "optimal well-being" but yet by this definition, healthy until symptomatic of a disease. And god help you if you have any abnormality-- again, let's think about who is defining normal here. Surface level abnormalities are easy... but how much of health is a surface level recognition? Sometimes it just a feel. So I knew I didn't have any diseases (tho I am the consummate virgo and therefore often contemplate whether I am suffering from Parkinson's, brain aneurisms or something equally implausible), but I wasn't ready to affix the gold seal of health just yet.

So there I was back sometime in June and with this lingering feel that while I was in some of the best fitness shape of my life, I didn't feel healthy but couldn't find any real explanation of how I could determine what health was to figure out where my gaps were. As I said a number of times in blog posts "I feel off." Clearly not in the state of "optimal well-being" and I needed to figure out why.

So my question to those of you who will wind up one day reading this-- Are you healthy? Do you even know what that means?