Health Part 1 - Physical Health

Health.

This is our goal.  What is it?  How do spiritual and physical health relate to each other and why?

To begin, we need a definition.  Try asking five people on the street what "health" is and you will probably end up with ten different definitions, but there seems to be a common thread throughout each definition: wholeness and balance.

While the understanding of the human body and disease has developed a lot since the time of Hippocrates, certain basic definitions have remained the same, and health is one of these. This is why we are going back to the origins of medicine to understand what health is.

The word health derives from the Old English word for "wholeness, being whole."

Galen saw health as "that sound and wholesome state, in which all the actions of nature are correctly performed" (Galen, De Optima Corporis Constitutione).  He went further to describe it as the balance of the humors [we will discuss these later].  Disease, by contrast, is caused by an imbalnce of the humors.  As the humors are tied to the temperament of a person, the ancients like Galen and Hippocrates saw both the physical health and the mental health of a person closely connected to this balance within the body (Galen, Ars Tuendae Sanitatis).

We see this same theme in Aristotle's De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics, as well as Plato's Republic. 

The WHO defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity."  While  some in modern medicine may not appreciate the broadness of this definition, I think it looks back to the notion of the whole person that the ancients understood--that man is not just a physical being, but has a spiritual side too.  These two aspects of man, body and soul, need to be healthy in order for the whole person to be healthy.

Physical health can be measured by a series of numbers.  As long as we fall into that range, we are considered healthy.  If we fall outside, then we are unhealthy.

It is important for each of us to have a baseline.  To know where we are starting from and to know where we need to be.

I would encourage everyone to get a yearly physical, and what better time to start than now.  Aside from weight and blood pressure, consider asking your primary care physician for a standard blood pannel which would include cholesterol levels, thyroid hormone levels, and blood glucose. As you continue this journey, always make sure you are consulting a licensed medical professional for medical advice.  Your PCP can also help monitor your progress.  

Next time we will look at spiritual health.

Peace!

Some Basics

As we get started, it is important to have some basic definitions so that we start on the same page.  This post, as with all future posts, will have two components to it: a spiritual/theological component and a nutritional component.

Our goal here is to get health, spiritually and physically.  It is often easier to understand health by means of its opposite.  Sin, for the Fathers, is the disease of the soul.  And just as we speak of obesity as being a disease of the body, so too we need to consider the disease of the soul.  Many view obesity as a taboo subject and are timid about assigning blame.  But I think it is important for all of us to ask ourselves to what extent is my obesity related to my bad choices.  This is important, even though it is true that there are some health conditions which can contribute to obesity, as well as limited access to good foods.

In a future post, I intend to discuss more profoundly the connection between the health of the body and the health of the soul.  This will help to explain why my posts will always consider spiritual health and nutrition together.

Let us begin with some theological definitions.  I think it is important that we understand what sin is. But in order to know what sin is, we have to know what goodness and evil are.

Goodness is the fullness of being appropriate to the kind of thing something is.   This is an old idea which is not just a Christian one, but from a Christian point of view one proof of this is the story of creation itself.  The revelation that the being of all things is good, and all that exists is good.  If we were not to admit this definition, we would be left to admit that God creates things that are evil.

Evil, in contrast, is non-being. In other words, it is a deficiency or negation.

This means that sin is the deliberate failure to live up to the standard of fullness of being which is proper to man.  The Greek word for sin, ἁμαρτία (amartia), means to "miss the mark".  It is a failure to achieve the standard or purpose for which man was created.  

In sinning, you are choosing the limitation of something unreal, non-being, instead of the actual fulfillment, which is rooted in God Himself.

Closely related to this is the discussion of the passions.  While the term "passion" can mean many things, I am going to turn to Maximos the Confessor for our definition here: an unreasonable affection or senseless hate for sensibly perceived objects or images.  It is the inclination to sin which is rooted in the sensible aspects of our nature. 

Other Christian thinkers meant something different by the word "passion."  For instance St. Thomas Aquinas' defined it as a movement of one of the sense appetites.

The Eastern tradition, typified by Maximos, used the term to mean something different. Aquinas uses the term to refer to something morally neutral, where as Maximos' uses the term to refer to a disease of the soul.  In fact, the Greek word for passion, πάθος (pathos), is related to the medical term "pathology", the study of disease. 

This is by no means the end of our discussion on sin and the passions, but is merely our foundation for our discussion.  

We now turn to our health definitions.  Before we discuss what "health" is, I would like to define nutrition and metabolism.  I think it is important to understand these first before we delve further, since these are the foundation for health of the human body. 

Nutrition, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is simply the process of providing or obtaining the food necessary for health and growth.  The WHO narrows the definition to the "intake of food, considered in relation to the body's dietary needs."  It goes further to say that good nutrition is "an adequate, well balanced diet combined with regular physical activity--[good nutrition] is a cornerstone to good health." 

A calorie is "the amount of heat needed to raise the temperature of 1 kilogram of water 1° C" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary).  When we speak of calories in food, we are actually speaking of a kilocalorie or "large calorie" which is used "to denote the heat expenditure of an organism and the fuel or energy value of food" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary). 

Metabolism is "the aggregate of all chemical processes that take place in living organisms. resulting in growth, generation of energy, elimination of wastes, and other body functions as they relate to the distribution of nutrients in the blood after digestion" (Mosby's Medical Dictionary).  To put it another way, it is how your body takes energy (calories) in its various forms, breaks it down and uses it.  To complete the various functions within the body, only a certain amount of calories are needed.  If we put in too many or too little calories, we end up with various medical problems from weight issues to malnutrition.  

Next time we will discuss health. 

Peace!

A New Year, An Old Journey

Oh great!  Another blog about fitness and dieting!  Like we need more! 

Well, not really.  

I want to take a year to look at weight issues, the obesity epidemic, fasting, and overall health within the context of the Eastern Christian tradition of the life of virtue.  

I want to walk through the readings of the Desert Fathers and the Fathers of the Church to get a better understanding of some of the issues I see plaguing the discussion of obesity today. 

What is our understanding of spiritual health and how does this affect our overall physical health? 

I also want to explore the saints' view of sin and food.   What is sin?  What are the passions? At what point is our obesity a sin, or rather, a symptom of a sin?  Can following the saints lead to a healthier life--not just spiritually, but physically? 

This is not to give you 10 easy tips to looking good in a bathing suit.  This is not to find a quick way out of losing weight.  I pray that this year will help us all take a closer look at our own relationship with food and see how it affects our relationship with Christ.  

I hope you will join me this year in reading the wisdom of the ancients, and hopefully we will find ourselves healthier, inside and out.