A Better Approach to a Healthy Life
Rethinking What It Takes to Feel Well, Stay Well, and Live Well
Women are remarkably good at pushing through.
We joke about the phenomenon of “man sick”—a relatively minor cold hits a man and, judging by the scene unfolding in the house, you would think he had contracted a rare tropical disease. He’s laid up in bed and needs everything to stop because he feels like he’s dying…from a head cold.
Meanwhile, women get sick and….keep going.
We take the kids where they need to go. We answer the emails. We figure out dinner. We reschedule whatever absolutely cannot happen and muscle through everything else because, really, what other choice is there?
Most of us recognize that we are pushing through when it’s a temporary virus. But when it’s our everyday life, we don’t tend to notice how much we’re pushing through in order to keep everything moving.
We push through the headache that keeps showing up. The sleep that has slowly deteriorated. The digestive issues that are annoying but manageable. The afternoon crash. The changes in our cycle. The brain fog. The clothes that suddenly don’t fit quite the same way.
Most of these things creep in slowly enough that we adjust around them. We compensate. We get accustomed to a new version of “normal.”
Then one day we look around and realize we don’t actually feel very good anymore.
We’re Finally Paying Attention to Women’s Health
Women’s health has been under-researched, underserved, and too often dismissed for years. Even now, women regularly walk into doctors’ offices with very real symptoms and leave with a pill to manage them, a blanket explanation that “it’s probably your hormones,” or the message that everything looks normal—so perhaps it’s stress, anxiety, or simply something they need to live with.
At its worst, the message is essentially: There’s nothing really wrong. It’s in your head.
But the conversation is changing. We’re seeing more and more conversations around our hormones, perimenopause, metabolic health, gut health, nutrition, sleep, muscle, stress and longevity. And we’re finally recognizing that common symptoms aren’t necessarily normal. Women who have spent years being told that everything looks fine are discovering that they can actually feel better.
But there’s a flip side to this new awareness that I believe has created another problem.
Somewhere between “You don’t have to just live with this,” and “Here are all the things you can do about it,” better health became one more thing women were responsible for getting exactly right.
When Better Health Became One More Thing to Achieve
Now that we know there is more we can do, apparently we’re supposed to do all of it.
Get enough protein, but also don’t forget the fiber. Get morning sunlight. Regulate your nervous system. Optimize your sleep. Support your lymphatic system. Pay attention to your glucose. Take the supplements. Reduce your toxic load. And don’t forget to add red light therapy, sauna, cold exposure, dry brushing, breathwork and whatever else made its way onto your feed this week.
Individually, many of those things may have merit.
Collectively, they can start to look like a second career.
And this is where I think we’ve created a strange false choice for women.
On one side, we can keep doing what women have always done: push through. Cover up the symptoms when we can, accept the ones we can’t, and keep life moving because there are kids to raise, careers to pursue, families to care for, communities to participate in, dinners to make, friendships to maintain and approximately 47 other things that need our attention.
Or we can attempt to do everything the wellness world tells us is required for optimal health—and discover that taking care of ourselves now requires so much time, money, planning and mental energy that the rest of our life starts to feel like an inconvenience.
In the midst of our worthy pursuit of better health, we made health itself the goal.
And that was never the point.
What Is the Goal of Being Healthier?
There’s a reason we care so much about our health. We want better energy, better sleep, stronger bodies, clearer minds, fewer symptoms, and better long-term health. We want to prevent disease where we can and support our families in doing the same.
But those things are not the end point.
Health matters because it creates the capacity to do our lives well.
We want the energy to engage with our families, the clarity to pursue work that matters, the strength to stay active, and the freedom to travel, socialize, serve, rest, and enjoy the life in front of us.
That’s a very different goal than simply chasing perfect lab values or making symptoms disappear. Those things can help us understand and improve our health, but they are not the reason we care about it in the first place.
The purpose is life.
And when we keep that at the center, it changes the way we pursue health.
A Healthy Life Has to Include the Living Part
I’ve never particularly liked the word balance. It implies that we should somehow keep every area of our lives perfectly even: the right amount of work, family, exercise, rest, relationships, health, community and everything else competing for our attention.
Life simply doesn’t work that way.
A friend recently told me that instead of balanced, she likes to think of life as harmonized, and I immediately latched onto that concept.
Harmony doesn’t require every voice to sing the same note at the same volume. Different voices rise and fall, but they work together. That feels much closer to what a healthy life actually looks like.
There are basic things we need for good health: nourishing food, quality sleep, movement and rest. But we also need relationships, faith, purpose, community and enjoyment. These aren’t separate parts of our lives. They influence one another, and together they shape our well-being.
That means a healthy life also looks like sitting around the dinner table connecting with your family, doing something fun with your kids, taking a vacation, laughing with your friends, or having a good cathartic cry. It looks like doing work that matters to you and getting outside because you enjoy it—not just because you’ve calculated the exact number of minutes of morning sunlight required for your circadian rhythm.
And none of that is going to happen in some perfectly controlled rhythm every day. Life changes. Some weeks are calmer; others are packed. Sometimes you have the time and space to cook a beautiful meal and sit down with people you love. Sometimes dinner is a protein bar in the car because, well, Tuesdays happen.
Those imperfect moments aren’t interruptions to a healthy life. They are part of one.
The goal isn’t perfect balance or perfectly executed health routines. It’s learning how the different parts of life can ebb and flow while still working together in a way that supports your health.
That isn’t perfect balance.
It’s a Health Life.
This Is What We Mean by a Health Life
Santé Vie literally means Health Life. And the longer I do this work, the more that name captures exactly what I want for the people we get to work with.
Not a life devoted to health. Not a life where we ignore our bodies until they force us to pay attention. A life where we take our health seriously because we understand what it makes possible.
We want to help people understand why they don’t feel well, connect the pieces that may not seem related, and use nutrition, lifestyle, testing, supplementation and other interventions thoughtfully when they’re needed.
But the goal isn’t to make you better at managing your health. It’s to help you build the kind of health that gives you greater capacity for everything else.
We don’t pursue health for the sake of being healthy. We pursue the life that better health makes possible.
And once we understand that, there’s another question worth asking: Are all the things we’re doing in the name of health actually helping us get there?
This is more than a philosophy at Santé Vie. It’s the way we work.
If you’ve been looking for an approach to health that goes deeper without requiring health to become your entire life, we’d love to talk with you. Reach out and let us know what’s going on with your health.
We’re continuing this conversation in the next article, Why You’re Doing All the “Right” Things but Still Don’t Feel Better, where we look at why even good health advice can become the wrong advice when it isn’t considered in the context of your body and your life.