No obsession is healthy because obsession often leads to anxiety and other behavioral disorders. Health is a state of comprehensive physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being.
However, people who maintain good health habits should not be labelled as obsessive where they feel it necessary to justify their own poor lifestyle choices. An awareness of well-being and health is positive as long as the beliefs and attitudes are reasonably well-balanced.
Neolife medical management
Obsessive behaviors tend to lead to oversimplification of health and lifestyle approaches, which leads to erroneous interpretations amongst the general public.
No, obsessing over your health is not healthy. No obsessive behavior is healthy. When a thought, idea or attitude moves beyond basic reason and voluntary control we must describe the resultant concept as an obsession that will lead to anxiety and other behavioral disorders.
The majority of Neolife’s clients are people who are health conscience, maintain good habits and are interested in all aspects of their health. But, from time to time we meet people with obsessive behaviors relating to nutrition, exercise, nutritional supplements or over-reliance on medical tests. The number of people who attend the clinic with this type of problem is increasing which is a reflection of how many of us have some form of OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) within us and also how we are constantly receiving information about health.
In the past we have had clients who have attended up to 3 significant health check-ups in the course of a single year: obviously this is an example of an obsessive behavior and arguably this type of individual will continue to be checked at other clinics on an ongoing basis. We also have patients who obsess over their food and which foodstuffs are good and bad for their health: there are really no good or bad foodstuffs, but moreover it is important for us to remember that we must control the frequency with which we eat.
In general terms, patients with obsessive behavior tend to oversimplify medical approaches: sugar is bad and lettuce is good, running is healthy and lifting weights will injure you, taking collagen is good, but vitamin E is bad etc. In addition, obsessive health-related behaviors tend to result in the individual focusing on a single discipline, either a vegan diet, yoga, meditation or running. Other elements of their health do not interest them: their obsession is the solution to their health.
Yes it is positive to be health conscious provided that you maintain a reasonably well-balanced perspective on health.
But there are also those who believe it is necessary to dismiss people with good health habits as obsessive with the sole intention of justifying their own poor habits. A real-life example: a female smoker, with a sedentary lifestyle who is overweight considers that her friend is obsessed with her health as she trains four days a week to run the San Silvestre. Another real-life example: a obese male with a sedentary lifestyle who has high cholesterol and high blood pressure considers that his wife is obsessed with her health because she eats healthy food, has a personal trainer and takes nutritional supplements.
An elevated health consciousness (awareness of your health) is not the same as being obsessed with your health. The difference is moderation; in the maintenance of a balanced perspective on health. Health is a state of comprehensive physical, emotional, mental and spiritual well-being. Nothing will happen if I do not exercise at this time, if I lose my nutritional habit or if I stop taking my nutritional supplements.
At the end of the day to achieve a certain objective, whether the objective is related to your work, personal life or health, we all need to be a little obsessive which ordinarily is not a problem as long as we remain balanced across the three key areas:
- Tolerance and experience. Open mind, intellectually curious, tolerant of change brought on by new experiences.
- Emotional stability. An intermediate (mid) point of emotional stability is desirable. If emotional stability is too low, you will be unable to adopt a behavior, but if it is too high you can suffer from arrogant traits and refuse to change your behavior.
- Kindness and interpersonal empathy. This allows you to incorporate ideas and behaviors of other people into your own.
At Neolife we try to understand your concerns and guide you towards a comprehensive, thoughtful and scientific approach to your health. As part of our Preventive Anti-Ageing Medicine Programs, we make personalized recommendations to our clients: for example to those who only run as a form of physical exercise, we explain the importance of strength training; to those who do not eat sufficient amounts of protein, we discuss the results from their diagnostic tests with them and explain the importance of this macronutrient; to those who consider nutritional supplements to be nonsense, we teach them what to take and why they should take them…