Health is a Verb; Not a Noun--An "Add" for the Book I'm Currently Writing

I love blogging about health and fitness, and I love hashing out and wrestling with new ideas, studies, concepts, and musings regarding what a healthy and fit lifestyle ought to entail. But, to tell the truth, much of what I, and maybe even you, consider "new" is usually nothing more than a recycled bit of yesterday's news. If you take a moment and think about it, little of what I've ever covered or talked about on my site is incredibly earthshaking.

• Whole foods are more satisfying than hyper-rewarding, calorie dense junk.
• Eating more calories than you burn makes you fat.
• If you commit to lifting progressively heavier weights, you'll become stronger and grow muscle.
• Regular walks, and occasional sprints are a more enjoyable and less chronically demanding means for improving our cardiovascular fitness, than is running yourself into the ground training for a marathon.
• And on, and on.....

Now of course, many of the above concepts may have seemed new to you whenever you first heard about them, but most of these ideas were being talked about and utilized long before many of us ever saw the light of day. Many of these ideas were in fact recognized by the ancient Greeks: (1) progressive resistance training; (2) eating too much food makes you fat; (3) food choice effects your health [dating to the 5th cen. BC, a Greek athlete advocated a diet rich in meat--much like my recommendation to consume plenty of protein if your goal is to build muscle]; etc.

Basically, despite what flashy ads and headlines may be telling you, there are no truly "revolutionary" dietary/fitness ideas. Most everything out there, whether it be a new diet book or fitness craze, is nothing but a personalized or reworded variant of the following themes--

• Eat nutritious food.
• Exercise regularly.
• Practice moderation.
• Get plenty of sleep.
• Eliminate sources of chronic stress.

Different people obviously have slightly different takes on what the above should entail, but, despite what advocates of varying health philosophies may espouse, most people are trying to convince you of the merits of essentially the same basic practices.

So why then are so many people still unhealthy? If, as a species, we've known what a healthy lifestyle looks like for thousands of years, why do so many people suffer from poor health [barring diseases which escape our personal efforts to take care of ourselves]?

The reason is this: some people don't do what they know.

This issue of not doing what you know you ought to do was, appropriately enough, a major issue for the ancient Greeks. The philosopher Aristotle made it his project for Ethics, not to discover what the ethical was, but how to put into practice the ethical virtues of which all Greeks already had an awareness. Aristotle didn't have to tell anyone what they ought to do, because they had stories [the Iliad and the Odyssey] which told them what the good and noble life looked like. The biggest question for the ancients had nothing to do with figuring out what was good; rather, it had to do with how to more easily go about enacting what was good.


The biggest contrast between the ancients and the moderns [us today] is that moderns seem to have this insipid preoccupation with figuring out what the good is, often to the extent that we fail to address how we can better go about putting what we know to be good into practice. We spend so much time concerning ourselves with the latest scientific studies [an act which causes us to major in the minors and minor in the majors] that we're dumbfounded when it comes to effectively living out the healthy lifestyle we know we ought to live.

We've become paralyzed by analysis, and worse yet, we've become habituated to living in this paralyzed state.

This is the issue I want to address in my book. So many would-be health "experts" seem convinced that they need to reinvent the wheel, or discover something totally new regarding what's "healthy," that the implementation of healthy is often thrown to the curb. I can think of no better sign of the utter failure of our discovery-driven society than the noticeable lack of progress we've made in combating the "obesity epidemic." If so many authors, scientists, and doctors have discovered a plethora new and radical breakthroughs in health/fitness, than why have so few people benefited?

People don't need to be told what healthy is; they need to be told how they can come to want to do what's healthy.

That's the type of book I want to right.