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Abs: may be nice to have, but is no requirement of health.
The truth is, you can be perfectly healthy and fit without having abs or being super lean! But rather than the focus being on health and fitness, it usually falls on weight-loss and how to build a defined physique in mainstream media. As a result, some may use unhealthy means of losing weight to obtain these physiques that can ultimately be detrimental to their health. For that reason, I think that it is immensely important to reframe what health and fitness are because nowhere in the dictionary does it reference a specific body type or size - at least from what I've found anyways.
So what are health and fitness?
Health - the state of being free from illness or injury
- a person’s mental or physical condition
Fitness - the quality of being suitable to fulfill a particular role or task.
Health
The state of being free from illness or injury.
While this is a very simple and straight-forward definition, I think that you can extend it even further as to mean taking care of your health today, so that you can also be free from illness and injury tomorrow.
The funny thing when it comes to health is that you don’t see the immediate effects of your poor dietary choices. You don’t develop hypertension from eating one cheeseburger, nor do you develop type II diabetes from eating one slice of cake. Hell, if you did, you probably wouldn’t eat either again! Rather, like most things, your daily choices have a compounding effect that will either impact your health positively or negatively over time, which will continue to build. These effects start small, such as feeling lethargic, lacking motivation and energy; therefore, you become less active. Since you're less active and eating the same amount of food, you start to see the scale slowly creep up, which starts to affect your self-esteem. A few years go by of eating more or less the same, maybe a decade or two, where you've been diagnosed with type II diabetes or heart disease and are now on medications to slow their progression.
However, some aren't always so lucky. The serious, life-threatening effects of poor choices over the years and decades, may only present itself through a fatal heart attack or another life-threatening ailment, even if the individual is seemingly healthy.
You see, lifestyle factors play an insurmountable role over your long-term health and longevity. Therefore, I would redefine health as nourishing one’s body to achieve a state of being free from illness or injury today and tomorrow.
Fitness
The quality of being suitable to fulfill a particular role or task.
Are you able to pick something off the ground easily, without discomfort? If you found yourself in dire circumstances, can you run a few kilometers if your life depended on it? Can you use the stairs to get from point A to B without becoming winded?
You don’t need to train like an athlete to be fit, but do you have the physical capacity to complete activities of daily living? To me, this means being free of shortness of breath, having the required strength to take your groceries to and from your car or having the ability to pick a case of water up off the ground; having the mobility to get from point A to B, and can physically function independently from others (assuming that you don’t have a preexisting physical limitations, of course).
To me, this is what fitness means: the ability to complete activities of daily living with ease.
Fitness is also important if you want to avoid injuries as you get older because it promotes and maintains one's mobility and strength. It can increase your overall cardiorespiratory capacity through aerobic exercise, increase your bone strength through resistance training, and can even mitigate lower back pain that is often associated with weakened core musculature.
To achieve these benefits, it is recommended to be active for at least 30 minutes a day, alternating between cardio and resistance training-based activities. This doesn't mean that you have to go to the gym either. Rather, it could mean biking, hiking, playing with your kids at the park, skating, or taking your dog for a walk a few times a day. There are a lot of fun activities that you can do, where doesn't even feel like you're working out! However, like health, the benefits of exercise - or lack thereof - can only be seen over time.
Therefore, I would redefine fitness as having the physical capacity to complete activities of daily living.
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Health and fitness go together hand-in-hand; you cannot have one without the other. You can focus solely on nutrition and lack fitness, and you can solely focus on fitness and still lack health.
If you haven’t noticed, there was not a single reference to specific body weight, size, or physique in these definitions which I think is incredibly important in trying to break the stigma that one needs to be 'thin' or 'built' to be healthy. Moreover, not all people may want to look that way either!
While of course, there are many health concerns associated with being underweight as well as overweight, a healthy and fit body can take different forms and doesn't always look like what you see online, in movies, or advertising. If we put this idea of what health 'looks' like aside and change our perspective to a lifestyle change, health and fitness can be more easily attainable. Therefore, I think that it is better to explore whether your daily food choices and activity levels are helping you to lead a healthy or not, and whether or not you're okay with that.
While abs may be nice to have, they aren't necessary for leading a healthy life.
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