Many will say that being alive is the most precious thing to them, so to protect their lives, they must be healthy. No matter what people do with their lives, there are consequences. Good lifestyles usually mean a person is healthy while bad lifestyles usually means a person is unhealthy.
Health was defined in its broader sense in its 1948 constitution by the World Health Organization as a state of complete physical mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.
Dr. Gale Alava, assistant professor of health management, defined health as the ability to care of oneself, not being sick, or not being in the hospital.
“Health is a balance between your social, physical, emotional activities, because physically, you can look like you are healthy, maybe your mind is not there, maybe you have a mental disease, maybe you have emotion distress or maybe you have financial problem, all these things makes health not to be balance,” said Alava.
Many years ago, mental and physical health were not considered equally important. For example, having depression is not the same as being treated for a bone fracture. Both physical and mental diseases should be treated the same, and should be paid the same way. There should be a balance between physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health in order to live healthy.
Thus “the most important thing in taking care of health is prevention, there are different levels of prevention, the most important one is avoiding getting sick in the first place,” said Alava.
It is very important to be healthy, that is why the World Health Organization made Apr. 7 a special day for everyone to check up on their health.
According to Teresa Dadez, director of the health and wellness center, “health is important because it gives you a quality of life that you can reach any goal you desire, you can have a brain that will function at the peak of its performance, and that helps when you get enough nutrition and oxygen to your body to keep it functioning well for 90 to 100 years.”
“Health is important for many things, healthy people actually feel better about themselves, healthy people have no issues to work with, healthy people are more productive, and health people hopefully have a longer life” said Alava.
Therefore, beyond avoiding diseases, being healthy and fit gives people the energy to live fully as opposed to merely surviving. Being around healthy people is inspiring to others, motivating them to be the best they can be.
“Be conscious of what you do today because when you are older is when you will realize what you do have done to yourself or should not have done when you are young. It is when you get older you will be seeing the effect,” said Laura Harvey, a nurse at the Health and Wellness Center.
There are numerous things one can do in order to be healthy.
“You have to eat right, you have to make sure you move your muscle all the time, because if you don’t use your muscles, you kind of lose your muscles, they kind of have memory of their own, muscles memory and they will do what you tell them to do,” said Dadez.”Your heart is included there, if you are using your heart too much like using it over time, to just sit there and work, it will run too fast, that is what is called Tachycardia. That is over 100 all the time, it is beating too fast, you have to learn what is going on to make it correct, that is because the blood volume is too low or your body is not healthy enough to get it keep moving around like it normally is, so it pumps harder which gives you high blood pressure.”
There are a lot of reasons for things to happen your health.
“If you are not taking care of yourself or get a disease that is hard to diminish like diabetes,” said Dadez.
That is why this year’s World Health Day is focused on diabetes.
“On this World Health Day, I want to call your attention to a disease that is affecting the lives and well being of more than 60 million people in the Americas. This disease is diabetes. It affects people of all walks of life, but it takes its greatest toll on people living,” said Carissa Etienne, Director of the Pan America Health Organization.
According to Alava, prevention is a major way of being healthy. It offers a better life and can help keep people from having to go to the hospital in some cases.
People should be concerned about their health and well-being to possibly live to be 100 years old, or older.
Dadez suggested not smoking as a way to keep oneself healthy, as many harmful chemicals are inhaled while smoking. “If you start from [a young age], if you take care of what you eat, if you don’t smoke, if you don’t [partake in]any risky behaviors, if you don’t engage in unhealthy practices, probably you are going to be ok,” said Alava.
So it is everyone’s responsibility to take care of him or herself. Being careless with one’s health can negatively affect his or her future.
“If you are aware of what can happen either by learning from your parents or learning from somebody else in your family problems that are genetics like diabetes, with education you monitor what your blood sugar is, at least once a year or if you have cancer that runs in your family, education will help you to be careful of your daily activities,” said Dadez.
“Education is the primary prevention of sickness,” said Alava. “The secondary prevention is knowing the sign and symptoms of a sickness, in order to start taken care of that quickly, getting treatment sooner to prevent the disease to get worst. And the third prevention is that when the disease happened, things to know that can actually get you normal into productive life and avoiding getting new disease in the future, things like psychotherapy, family therapy, counseling, interpersonal therapy etc.”
It is best to be aware of one’s own body and how one feels as being healthy involves have solid well-being physically, mentally, emotionally, and socially.
