An Introduction to Healthful Activity for Life

Just do it; Talk is cheap; Walk the walk, don’t talk the talk; You are what you do; and a score of other slogans reinforce the ancient aphorism that actions truly do speak louder than words.  More important: Research certifies that truth. 

Healthful Activity for Life will advocate activity above all else.  More precisely: rational, organized, comprehensive, and long-lived healthful activity will be our enduring focus.  We shall discuss and apply evidence-based medical and psychological insights to promote thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that produce salutary physical and mental outcomes.

Ours is a self-help approach to healthful lifestyle improvement that focuses on the process of change more than on the content of any particular change.  Six health essentials are emphasized: cognitive-emotional status, interpersonal relationships, physical conditioning, diet-nutrition, work, and relaxation-recreation.  You will be guided toward understanding how your unique history, temperament, personality, and environments contribute to your current lifestyle and to potential health-enhancing alterations. 

Healthful Activity for Life integrates physical and mental health activities such that improvement in one enhances the others.  The health essentials are best approached holistically, since one’s standing on each affects the rest.  We all know, for instance, that a healthy weight, theoretically, can be achieved purely by strictly limiting calories.  But we also understand that diet-nutrition works best when combined with sensible physical conditioning.  Similarly, our cognition, emotion, interpersonal relationships, work, and relaxation-recreation activities all can influence our diet-nutrition by predisposing us to certain eating practices rather than others. 

The interconnectedness of essentials is such that healthful change is most effective and efficient when we overlap activities into salubrious activity networks.  Continuing with the healthy weight example, we might combine healthful diet-nutrition activities with healthful interpersonal relationship activities by enrolling in a healthy eating program with a spouse or friend.

Connection is key for creating and implementing healthful lifestyle change.  Like the health essentials, body and mind are inextricably interconnected; so too is the person and their environments.  Moreover, each of the four factors—history, temperament, personality, and environments—continuously interacts with the others.  The whole truly is much more than the sum of its parts.  Healthful Activity for Life elucidates and facilitates the processes required to identify the connections, and to use them effectively and efficiently to promote integrated physical and mental health.