Health: The One Goal Worthy of Pursuing
In his book The Five Pillars of Biblical Success Gary North discusses how important it is to pursue success not success indicators. An illustration he uses is that a good student in general will get good grades, but pursuing good grades does not make one a good student. One can also get good grades through cheating. This principal should not only be applied towards achieving ones life purpose; it should be applied to our goals in beauty, fitness, and health. Your goal should be a complete body optimized for success in your chosen ventures.
Most people pursue health indicators such as being light, thin, sexually attractive, muscular, strong, successful in a sport, happy, or free from sickness. These are health indicators not actual healthiness. They will probably appear as a side effect from living a healthy life, but achieving them will not make one healthy. The downside of pursuing health is that there is no quantitative test you can run to measure your progress. As you become healthier more and stronger signs of health will be present in your life; however, your goal must remain healthiness. I have found it very easy to shift my goal from health to a health indicator. In weight lifting Pavel Tsatsouline says that you should only test your maximum capability once a month so that you don’t get too caught up in setting personal bests instead of doing the work needed to attain them. This is a good rule for measuring improvements in body shape and performance.
What happens if you pursue a success indicator instead of health? You often achieve your goal but must live with unanticipated side effects far which outweigh the accomplishment you have achieved. Body builders and strength athletes often resort to steroids to increase their muscle mass and strength. Steroids work by artificially increasing testosterone; they do their job of increasing muscle mass and physical strength well. Unfortunately, side effects include mood swings, baldness, heart problems, liver problems, and shrinking sexual organs. On Warrior Radio with Ori Hofmekler and Marty Gallagher I learned that many body builders need extensive therapy for their body to produce any testosterone once they have retired due to the large amounts of steroids they consumed during their career. As one might imagine, the results of this are terrible and far outweigh having large biceps and a couple of championships.
Although it is better to pursue performance in a sport as a goal rather than having an attractively shaped body, concentrating exclusively on sports is still not a good idea. Retired professional football players have a higher risk of heart disease and around 40 percent of retired football players have trouble walking due to degenerative arthritis caused by the pounding they take in football games. I know runners with achy joints and bones weakened from stress fractures. These bodily malfunctions came from placing athletic performance above healthiness.
Beauty is one of the best health and success indicators; however, beauty pursued as an end in and of itself can be problematic. In the extreme it can lead to using cosmetic surgery to artificially augment body parts and eating disorders to lose weight. Dangers do not come only with these extreme measures: most cosmetics contain toxic or carcinogenic ingredients. Many people do not think that consuming small amounts of toxic materials makes a difference after all if it could hurt me, wouldn’t it be illegal? This view ignores the fact that around one third of Americans working in sealed buildings suffer from multiple chemical sensitivity. Weight loss is often embarked upon in order to become more beautiful. Most people try to lose weight by eating low calorie foods. This is counter productive because obesity is often caused by malnutrition since the body is lacking needed nutrients it sends out a message to eat causing the dieter to consume even more low calorie foods. Weight loss is not achieved by eating nutrient void low calorie, low fat, or low sodium foods. Eating these foods exacerbates the problem by putting more substance into the body without addressing the root cause. These problems could have been avoided by working on becoming healthy which will make your body move towards its ideal weight naturally.
The aforementioned problems may not happen immediately if you pursue a health indicator instead of overall health. However, pursuing these indicators causes you to take short cuts which give short term success at the expense of long term health and will eventually cause serious problems.
What is a complete body or person? How do you know you’re making progress? A healthy person is disease free, beautiful, strong, emotionally stable, and intelligent. However, they may not meet society’s standards for success. Look at photographs of healthy people in Disease and Physical Degeneration by Weston Price, they have beautiful faces and robust bodies but none of them will ever appear on the front cover of either Vogue or Muscle and Fitness. Here are some guidelines to determine whether something will bring you close to a complete body.
- 1Any change you make to improve your body should be natural and should not involve artificial chemicals.
- There is no “get rich quick” scenario
- An idea may be new to you, but it should not be completely original. Almost everything worthwhile has been known in the past and used by other people. It may have been forgotten over time, but it will have existed before.
- There should be a positive indirect effect other areas of your life
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