The Path to Health: Secrets, Hacks, and Magic
A Look at Self, Health, and Identity
Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash
The gimmicky commerciality of health and fitness is exhausting.
How many times have you seen a similar headline?
“The real secret to abs…”
“The only exercise you need…”
“The one food or supplement to rule them all!”
“Scientists and doctors hate this expert!”
“The one hack nobody knows that will get that body you’re after!”
On and on they go.
Yawn.
If any of these panned out, they’d be plastered everywhere and all at once. Your social feeds would be flooded; it’d be constantly on the local and national news. Schools would cancel classes. The stock market would be exploding, and people would be losing their minds, running into traffic like infected zombies.
Maybe the reaction wouldn’t be so intense, but you probably get it. If these headlines were true, we’d know it. Instead, sadly, they are fiction, and bad fiction at that. Yet, we all love a good hook, even if the story is predictable.
Unfortunately, there’s no secret to becoming healthy, no hack, no magic food, formula, potion, or pill to achieving a healthy body and a healthy bodyweight.
You’re probably thinking: “This guy better not tell me to eat right and exercise.”
Not exactly, but that’ll definitely work.
What will get you there is how you see yourself, your identity.
Imagine a person who struggles with weight and has become an unhealthy person. Eating nutritious foods is a chore, and exercise is an impossibility. This routine, this lifestyle, is this person’s maintenance and baseline. To fix it, what many people do in a similar situation is make a short-term lifestyle U-turn.
All salads and 60-minute daily treadmill sessions for a month! Let’s go! Woo!
The weight comes off a bit, but adherence diminishes before long because it’s not a sustainable system, and soon, the individual reverts to the baseline. In stats, this is regression to the mean. It’s a pull back to the average.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear describes a friend who, coincidentally, also lost over 100 lbs. She started assuming an identity of a healthy person and let that identity be the guiding force in many decisions. She would ask herself, “What would a healthy person do in this situation?” In her case, she didn’t feel or identify herself as a healthy person, but she started acting like one.
It was a minor internal shift that had seismic consequences.
Instead of hitting up the drive-thru for lunch, I’ll start bringing some food. I don’t feel like working out today, but a healthy person doesn’t skip workouts because they feel “meh”.
These little decisions and actions add up, and anyone of us can make and sustain progress in the direction that we want. Seemingly minor decisions and actions start setting up a sustainable system, and before long, the outside identity matches the inside one.
Apparently, there’s a whole sector of academic literature called medical psychology and medical sociology that explores health identity and illness identity.
Pelle Pelters is a lecturer at Stockholm University and has researched and written in depth about the intersection of identity and health. In “I am what I am? —An integrative review of understandings of ‘health identity’ and ‘illness identity’ in scientific literature” [1], Pelters provides a detailed review of these terms and concepts, which have wide and varied interpretations, but they have practical applications for us average Joes trying to find our footing on and in the healthscape.
Essentially, a health-identity is when someone has a sense of self as a healthy person and answers the question, “Who am I in terms of health?” An illness-identity is when someone has a sense of self as an ill person and answers the question, “Who am I with regard to illness?”
Each identity informs how an individual lives, and a health-identity is associated with more positive outcomes, with potential and optimization.
An illness-identity is associated with more negative beliefs and notions, understandably. There’s a forced identity shift as a person transitions into living with a permanent injury, disease, or condition. Still, there are positive aspects for an illness-identity, such as a sense of community. If a person is diagnosed with cancer, it’s helpful for an individual to a find a group of people who are in a similar position.
Whichever identity a person has, as Pelters notes, each is a mindset and a narrative of the self.
Instead of illness-identity, for our purposes, I’d like to dichotomize this as a healthy-identity and an unhealthy-identity. Most of us don’t tend to think of ourselves is such stark delineations, but if we really consider it, we can probably label ourselves to one side or the other.
I know someone with a bar, and once upon a visit, I got to observe some interesting behavior trends. Naturally, people drink in bars—no surprise there. However, patrons would often step outside to have a smoke, but that’s also not too incredible. What was a surprise to me was that customers would start bringing in their bounties of fast food. Hamburgers and fries; fried chicken; pizza. Typical bar food. This was a late afternoon in the middle of the week. It was routine, their baselines. One unhealthy behavior paved the way for others.
By contrast, at the gym, I often see people with water bottles or tumblers, and there might be someone sipping on a sports drink. I may see some young guys walking around with a gallon-jug of water (it’s always the young guys for some reason). These are healthy behaviors supporting other healthy behaviors: staying hydrated maintains exercise performance; performance requires proper rehydration with fluid and electrolytes.
From the bar, my friend has tales of drunken belligerence, brawls, and theft. I’m sure these things happen on occasion at gyms, but I’ve spent a lot of time in many gyms over the years, from one side of this country to the other, and I’ve never witnessed any of these myself.
The idea here is that one set of behaviors begets more of such behaviors. Each identity, whether the individual recognizes it or not, is self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating. Healthy choices and behaviors motivate us to continue making healthy choices, while the opposite is also true.
It doesn’t matter what your current health status or condition is. You can choose to identify as a healthy person this very second. If you do, you’ve just altered your trajectory; you’ve stepped out of your original timeline and crossed into a new reality in the multiverse.
Seriously. If you choose to identify as a healthy person, that identity is going to inform and guide many if not most of your decisions and actions. It takes a lot of would-be problems off the table. It reframes your world view.
Does a healthy person eat fast food? Occasionally but not often.
Is a healthy person active? You bet.
Does a healthy person prioritize sleep? Certainly.
Before my own transformation, I was just a guy in the middle—that identity no-man’s-land—a guy who worked out here and there, usually a couple of times a week, but nothing really structured or routine. There was a time when I frequently ate at restaurants, and most food selections were something I ate with my hands and came with a side of fries. Most of the food I had at home was ultra-processed—out of a box and into the micro.
Before I lost weight, I decided to become a healthy person. I didn’t know what to do or how to do it, but I was gonna die learning and trying. Really. My health was such that I would not have lasted much longer on my trajectory anyway. I have a family history of heart disease, and I was ahead of the bell curve.
Like the friend in James Clear’s example, I started making healthier choices. It was like my own internal algorithm for operational programming, and I reset it. Some changes were easy and quick. Others had a learning curve and needed some transitional time.
If I went out to eat, I started thinking like a healthy person. Instead of randomly selecting something I thought looked appealing, I started looking for the healthiest items. When I realized that most foods at most restaurants are just a spectrum of unhealthy choices, from worse to worst, that changed the frequency of my restaurant visits, and when I did go to one, I changed the kinds of restaurants I visited. Instead of the big, fast-casual commercial chains, when I go somewhere now, it’s a local place, and it serves simple foods prepared simply. [2]
When I went food shopping, I started buying more whole foods, which meant that I started to have to prepare them. So I had to learn recipes and basically learn how to cook—a basic yet important skill to have.
I started working out three times a week, at the minimum, no matter what. I had my regular days, but if I had to miss one, I would make it up later in the week. I went from having random workouts to having a thoughtful and carefully designed weightlifting program.
I went from a guy who rarely walked his dogs to a guy who walks his dogs almost daily. My health-identity also helped me make better food choices for them, too. (They get vitamins now also.)
For me, this was a fun journey, one of those few times in life where we get to reinvent ourselves, to metamorphosize. It was also course-correcting, taking care of business, righting a wrong I had put off for so long. My outside-self was slowly revealing my inner-self. It’s like the fat suit around my identity was melting away figuratively just as much as it was literally.
This all might sound like work to some people, that health nuts live like monks, abstaining from material pleasures and are missing out.
Man, where’s the fun? All those workouts, rarely drinking, and always eating that rabbit food? I couldn’t do it.
These are the “criticisms” I sometimes hear when having conversations about health.
Eating healthy foods and being active make me feel good. It feels good to feel good. In fact, I’d argue that few things are genuinely better in life than feeling good and healthy. You shouldn’t feel like garbage after a meal. You should feel satisfied and sated, happy and healthy, even invigorated. You shouldn’t dread a workout. You should look forward to moving your body.
I’ve dipped my toes into my former food choices here and there. It’s repugnant. I can’t imagine having more than a mouthful of some of the crap I used to live on. And If I sit for a half hour, I’m already jonesin to get up and get moving. I got hit with COVID last year, which bulldozed me for a week, and even then, I was still itching to work out. Also, before making the change I would watch a couple of hours of TV nightly and waste time on social media, but I don’t do much of either these days. We all need downtime, but squandering it by absorbing negative content is not healthy.
Every decision and action to be healthy or to be healthier is also a decision and action to feel good, to feel well. In Atomic Habits [3], James Clear says that each of these actions, no matter how small and seemingly insignificant, is a vote to becoming the person we want to be.
Small but consistent decisions and actions lead to systems, and when the system is established, there’s not much effort required, either cognitive or physical, to maintain it.
Being healthy is not a sacrifice. Choosing to be unhealthy and unwell, that is the sacrifice.
If there’s any one real trick, any hack, secret, or magical thing we can do to make ourselves healthy, it starts with adopting a healthy identity.
And that’s the easy part, and it can start right now.
Pelters, P. (2024). “I am what I am?—An integrative review of understandings of ‘health identity’ and ‘illness identity’ in scientific literature.” Sociology of Health & Illness, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.13771
A byproduct of fewer restaurant visits is the savings. It’s easy to drop 50 bucks for a meal for two people at a restaurant, but you can stretch $50 pretty far in the grocery store.
A brilliant book with profound ideas that are well communicated. The ideas and examples here are described before the end of chapter 2.
