How Healthy Are You?

Health is subjective. Some people are very healthy, while others are only a little. The notion that you are either healthy or unhealthy is completely ridiculous. The idea that you healthy or not, as if it is black and white, just doesn’t work for me.

Health is more like a spectrum and you can be anywhere from one end to the other. Healthy is at one end and unhealthy is all the way on the other end of the spectrum. We all tend to think we are on the healthy side, but it is important to know for sure.

The key to actually living closer to the healthy end of the spectrum is to do healthy things. That is easy enough to understand. But how do you actually know where you are on the spectrum? There is really only one way to know.

The only way to know how healthy you are is to assess your current health. There are many ways to do that. The best and most common ways to assess your health are:

- Going to the doctor for preventative check-ups
- Taking health risk assessments
- Keeping up your healthy habits

These 3 methods are pretty straight forward, but let’s take a look at how you can use them all to your advantage.

Preventative Check-ups

You’ve heard it since childhood, going to the doctor’s office is good for you. You may not have liked it, but you went anyway. The reason you went as a kid was to make sure you didn’t have anything wrong with you. Now that you are an adult, that reason still holds true. It’s not enough to assume everything is fine. You have to get checked out in order to know if something is wrong or not. Once you have done that, you will know that everything is fine.

Health Risk Assessments

In the corporate environment, health risk assessments are very common. They are a great way for companies to ensure that their employees are taking a look at their numbers. This is also a good way for the company to get a look at the health numbers of their employee population. The data is protected by law, so personal information is never shared with the company. They are only able to look at aggregate data, so employees don’t need to be concerned about their privacy. Most companies offer incentives for taking health assessments too. In the future, we will see more and more companies tying health assessments to the health plan and incentives will make significant impact on premiums and deductibles paid by employees.

Healthy Habits

It is important to know your numbers. Going to the doctor to get your check-up is a great start. If you know your current health and have received validation from your doctor, you can be sure that you are good…at least for now. The next step is the health assessment. This is a quick and easy way to get a snapshot of your current health numbers.

These options are essential. It is important to get check-ups and take health assessments each year, but they are only the results of what you’ve done over the course of year. If you don’t do anything to improve your health, it doesn’t matter what your numbers look like. In fact, you can be sure that they will keep getting worse year after year.

Using any of these 3 methods to know your numbers will help you plan your routine. Using all of these 3 methods will keep you on the right track. Being healthy is not just about being young. None of us is as young and healthy as we think we are. Without the habits, our health is on a steady decline from birth until death. It is important to actually know where you are on the spectrum of health. When was the last time you went to the doctor or took a health assessment? What does your health routine look like? All of these questions lead to one very important one: How healthy are you?