Would you rather be healthy, or happy?

Hard question right? Maybe you don’t need to choose between the two. Maybe health and happiness are so entwined that improving one means improving the other?

Research has found that happiness is associated with living longer and a reduction in all-cause of death. Happy people seem to have healthier hearts. They recover more quickly from surgery, lower blood pressure, and an immune system that more effectively fights off colds and the flu.

So what do you think? Does being healthy make you a happier person? Or does being happy actually improve your health? Or maybe…it’s that our level of happiness influences our health behaviors. If we’re unhappy, are we more likely to smoke, not workout, and over eat ?

After asking these questions and giving it much thought, I think it’s clear that there is a close connection between happiness and health.

I believe being happy starts with taking good care of your health and being healthy means that you are functioning as you were intended to function; resulting in feeling energetic and capable of performing a wide range of activities. Activities include our favorite hobbies which also causes us much happiness. For example, if you’re a person that enjoys bike riding but you eat cheeseburgers and French fries every day, how long do you expect to be able to continue bike riding? It’s only natural for our bodies to shut down after consuming too much fat, sugar or bad carbohydrates. Needless to say if we want to continue doing the things that make us happy, we must first start with living a healthy lifestyle so we are capable of performing these things.

Let me help ease your concerns a little. Being healthy doesn’t necessarily mean you can never eat cheeseburgers or French fries, it just means there should be a balance. For example, choose one day a week to eat your favorite foods and then discipline yourself the other six days to eat healthy foods. This will create good eating habits which will come natural in time.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss a little bit about my personal struggle with creating a healthy lifestyle for myself and some strategies you might find helpful if you’re someone seeking a similar goal.