Health is the state of a person’s physical, mental and social well-being. This includes a feeling of personal satisfaction and a sense of control over one’s life and environment. It also involves an ability to function in society and to enjoy a sense of belonging to a community. This is a positive conception of health, unlike the negative concept of a diseased body that has been prevailing in recent decades as modern medicine makes major advances in understanding the origins and causes of diseases and how to prevent them.
The first step to a healthy lifestyle is eating right and getting regular exercise. This includes consuming a diet that contains the recommended amount of nutrients for your age and gender. It also means watching your weight and avoiding foods that are high in fat, sugar or salt. Regular exercise helps decrease stress levels, promotes a healthier mood and reduces the risk of developing certain diseases.
Another important aspect of health is a person’s ability to cope with life’s challenges and to maintain emotional stability. Having positive social relationships, staying involved in the community and participating in hobbies can all help you develop these coping skills.
Lastly, it is important to have the necessary resources to maintain good health. This can include having access to affordable healthcare and an adequate income. These factors are often called ‘the determinants of health’ and are known to influence both the health of individuals and the health of communities.
For individuals, the determinants of health are generally considered to be a combination of factors that can be controlled or modified, such as genetics, environment, nutrition and exercise, lifestyle choices and access to healthcare. The determinants of health for communities can be more difficult to understand and are usually described as a result of social and economic conditions, such as poverty, housing, education, the quality of local infrastructure and the level of public services.
Although a variety of approaches have been used to improve the health of individuals and communities, many of these have failed because they have focused on changing only one or two aspects of an individual’s lifestyle. This has led to limited success because the other factors are beyond the reach of healthcare providers.
A new approach, called the health promotion paradigm, is based on a broad definition of health and emphasizes the need to improve people’s ability to function in their communities (Aguirre-Molina 1996). This approach takes into account the ways that a person’s functioning and the structure of community systems interact with each other and influences the origins of health. It is therefore important to consider both the positive and negative influences that a person’s health has on the function of societal systems. This is a more holistic view than the narrow definition of health as merely the absence of disease and is a more useful way to frame initiatives to improve the health of communities. In addition, this view emphasizes that people will only take action to promote their own health if it is placed high on their scale of values.