"It was years before I began connecting the dots between my symptoms, my diet and the meds. It took even longer for me to question my definitions of health. What does it mean to be healthy? Is it about weight? Many of us tell ourselves that health is all about weight, especially women. I am guilty of this, even now, but does weight really correspond to health? Is health something that simple? Certainly, at the extreme ends of weight, there are significant, linear correlations between health and weight, but for the rest of us who fall somewhere in the middle, it is not that clear cut.
We know now that body mass index or BMI, the shorthand calculation that most physicians use to determine obesity and by association ill-health, falls short for most athletes, many women, and is especially problematic for older women and men, because it doesn’t consider muscle mass. Neither does it consider fitness level nor cardiovascular health, the primary driver for most weight loss campaigns. If weight is not correlated with these other measures of health, one has to wonder if weight is sufficiently sensitive to gauge human health. Perhaps, it is not....
Long story short, when we think about health, what it is and what it isn’t, addressing medications, diet and lifestyle (exercise) variables are critical. I always had the exercise component in my favor, but diet and medication use has been problematic. I have recently come to understand, that if we have symptoms ‘requiring’ medications, then we are not healthy, no matter what we tell ourselves and how good we look in those tight or not so tight jeans. In fact, those meds are probably masking and/or exacerbating the real causes of ill-health. Instead of piling on more and more medications, begin disentangling the root of your symptoms, address dietary problems, nutrient insufficiencies and lifestyle variables. I suspect for many of us, with a bit of detective work combined with some lifestyle adjustments, health is within reach. It just may not look like what we have been conditioned to believe it should."