In this article, I will talk about the 5 pillars of health. Health is a very vague term and can be used in different ways and different contexts.
It is also a very personal matter and different people have different perspectives on what health truly is.
Table of Contents
The 5 Pillars of Health
Despite your personal, cultural or environmental influences, health is made up of 5 important pillars:
1) Supply,
2) Action,
3) Inaction,
4) Energy,
5) Balance.
In this article we will briefly cover Supply and Action, while also outlining the parts of Inaction.
1. Supply
I use this term to describe any kind of materialistic input for our physical body.
Our bodies are satisfied with ‘Supply’ when the following requirements are met:
a. Nutrition and supplementation,
b. Sunshine,
c. Hydration.
a. Nutrition and supplementation
Nutrition is a process that involves making appropriate dietary selections and consuming foods that are natural (organic) and not synthetic, in order to meet our energy needs to sustain, repair or improve our physical bodies.
This might also involve the use of legumes, nuts, herbs and spices depending on one’s nutritional program. Overall, nutrition is based on the consumption of food.
Food can be plant-based or animal-based. Depending on your beliefs, you should be consuming a balanced ratio of both. While I do not believe in the way modern food industry treats animals, I still believe that a small portion of animal products are essential for health.
Supplementation is considered a branch of nutrition. Our modern world has been rendering food more and more nutritionally depleted. This means we are not getting as much nutrition, enzymes and vitamins like we used to do 50 years ago. You can read about this matter in my article on why supplementation is necessary for our health.
Another reason for supplementation is that aging depletes certain substances in our bodies or the mechanisms used to create those substances are not optimal anymore. Enzymes are an example of those substances and they are required for proper energy extraction from foods. (Read about the importance of enzymes here) All in all, supplementation with dietary supplements or herbs is a small and yet important step towards a healthier life.
b. Sunshine
People always underestimate the power of the sun. As human beings, we need sun in order to make Vitamin D3. Lack of vitamin D3 can wreak hormonal havoc in your body. Without adequate Vitamin D in your system, your body will become weaker and more susceptible to diseases and especially cancer.
Not to mention that an imbalanced hormonal profile can leave a person depressed with bad mood with a very bad sex life. Getting sun is important for our existence.
c. Hydration
Getting enough high quality water is also very important for our system. Our body is made up of an average of 60% water while some of our organs have an even higher amount (lungs are 83% water and kidneys 79%). When dehydration takes place, our body cannot perform any of its required functions for its maintenance or even survival as organs die or shut down.
The water in our bodies is also used to transfer toxins out of our system through sweat or urine. So when we do not get enough of it, all these toxins stay inside and build up over time, corroding everything along the way.
So make sure you get at least 2 liters of water a day as a minimum. Do not wait until you are thirsty in order to drink water. Make it a habit to drink 2 glasses of water upon waking up. Your body will thank you for it.
2. Action
Action is the process of doing or achieving a specific goal. The hows and whys are not important at this point.
I use this term to encompass all the physical elements a human being should be performing for a healthy life.
We could say that ‘action’ can be fully defined by using the combination of the following terms: exercise and movement, mobility and flexibility.
a. Movement and Exercise
Movement is quite a simple concept. You need to move more. Your body is made for moving, not sitting all day. If you do not move, your muscles get weaker and other organs work harder to compensate for that. Since your muscles do not move, any extra calories you might consume will turn into fat and your body becomes a painful cage for a painful existence.
Exercise is a must for proper health. You don’t need a gym in order to exercise. You can do something as simple as walking. However and depending on the individual, that may not be enough if we want to be healthy. For that reason, we will use the term exercise to describe specific physical movements that aim in fulfilling special needs of our body. These needs can be functional like running faster or jumping higher. Or they may be targeting aesthetics like losing fat and gaining more muscle, like in the case of bodybuilding.
More muscle can also facilitate better exercise and better movement while losing fat means also losing toxins and better hormone levels. As you can see, all needs of the body, either functional or aesthetic are interconnected and interrelated just as much as movement and exercise are.
b. Mobility and flexibility
Last but not least, we have mobility and flexibility. These two become very important especially as we age since we tend to get more stiff and rigid. Maintaining proper mobility and flexibility throughout our lives is important if we want to live a healthy and especially pain-free body. If you have ever had an injury that did not allow you to move properly, you know exactly what I mean. If not, do not wait until you are old, your joints hurt and can only move by using a wheelchair to start caring about your mobility and flexibility.
As you can see the subject of action is too complicated and wide and cannot be covered here but I hope I gave you a brief understanding of what it encompasses.
In the next article, we will take a closer look at Energy and Balance.
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Also if you have any comments or questions, feel free to leave a comment and I will get back to you as soon as possible. Thanks!
by Nick Sigma
CWC, EH, E-YRT200
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