Thursday, September 20, 2007

How do you define failure?

An anonymous individual left me a rather harsh comment on my last post... The main gist was that I had a choice to be healthy or not during the week I had a house guest in my home. And, because I made some poor choices during that week, I must not really be a fit or healthy person.

That, of course, generates an interesting philosophical question.

How do you define failure to live a healthy life?

Does cheating during one meal mean that your lifestyle isn't really healthy? Or skipping one workout?

What if you take a break from healthy living for a full day... or week... or month?

At what stage have you failed at all your fitness and nutrition goals?

Personally, I think there is no such thing as failure when it comes to fitness and health. If a 600 pound man can lose weight and get healthier, then every single one of us can get fit and strong at any point in our lives.

Moreover, I believe the all-or-nothing approach to fitness and health lacks balance. Even the strongest fitness competitors have "free" days and vacation time where they relax their rules of nutrition and exercise... and these are people who compete in serious fitness contests!

So, in my humble opinion, I don't believe there is such a thing as failure when it comes to health. Nor do I believe that there's such as thing as total success. For everyone--regardless of where you are in life--there's always the chance that you can improve your fitness, strength and nutrition.

3 comments:

Cory said...

WOW. I can see why anon didn't leave a name attached to that comment. I wouldn't want it to be known that I said something that awful either. As if anon had never skipped a workout or ate something other than a vegetable!

:) At least you're able to put together an adult response to it.

Fatinah said...

you go girl! couldn't agree with you more!

John said...

How do you define failure? You get to define it. In other words you set a goal. Vigorous exercise for 200 minutes. If you exercise for 199 minutes, have you failed? That depends on what you define failure. Maybe 50 minutes is failure. Or success/failure is a continuum, probably a better idea if you want to be nice to yourself. If you ran only for 199 minutes, you were 99.5% successful, and 0.5% unsuccessful.

As for the comment that was left, I believe that since any weight loss blog is about being nice to yourself and looking after yourself, comments like that have no place on a blog. I would certainly have deleted it. The writer needs to know that going around writing acts of random hatred are a waste of time.