Let’s talk about the definition of health.
Most people define health as the absence of disease. Another way that people are defining health is by the way a person physically looks.
The way I define health is about adaptability. How well does your body adapt to stressors either internal or external stressors as they are introduced into our body. How well can your system adapt to those stressors. Adaptability is the definition of health. If our body can effectively adapt to stressors then our body is healthy. Therefore if a stressor comes into your body and your body is unable to manage it or adapt to it, then your system is not in a healthy state. This is a great distinction from just saying that health is an absence of disease.
True health is about adaptability and the better our body can adapt to stressors the healthier our systems are.
How adaptable our your system?
One of the ways we test for adaptability is with a test called Heart Rate Variability. Heart Rate Variability is assessing the autonomic nervous system. That’s the part of the nervous system that runs in the background and we don’t consciously control it. There are two parts to the nervous system, the stress state and the rest, digest and repair. So we can see how stressed your system is and how well your body is able to adapt to stressors and how these two systems are related to each other. This gives us great insight into the health of your body and how well your body can adapt. The better we can adapt, the healthier we are.
We as a society need to redefine what we call healthy, because when we are saying that healthy people are dying of an infection, that person was not actually health because their system did not adapt effectively to a stressor.
