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What Most People Miss When Trying to Become Healthier

If you want to find a lifestyle of freedom, and not restriction

Kaki Okumura
3 min readFeb 27, 2022
Illustrations by Kaki Okumura

When you type in ‘healthy’ in Google, do you know what definition comes up? It is quite literally defined as, ‘in good health’.

It’s a seemingly simple concept– to be “healthy” — but the truth is that many of us haven’t spent that much time thinking about what this means, and upon closer examination, many of us aren’t really sure how to measure being healthy.

At the most basic level, many of us have been taught growing up that ‘healthy’ is about having a BMI within a certain range. If your ratio of body mass to height is within that range, your doctor may have told you that you are healthy.

Other times we are encouraged to measure being healthy by attaining certain physical features, like a six pack or toned legs, or by meeting certain endurance milestones, like running a 7-minute mile. Sometimes we are told to measure it by fitting into a certain size pants, other times we are told to track our waist size to determine if we are healthy enough.

It’s one of the most common mistakes to being healthy that I hear, and it’s foundational:

“If you’re XYZ weight/size/fitness level, then you’re healthy.”

Many people attribute the idea of being healthy to numbers and metrics like weight, clothing size, the number of miles they can run, or the amount of weight they squat. But when we really think about it, it doesn’t make sense for all of us to measure it in the same way.

Because how could your sibling/parent/grandparent/neighbor/child possibly be measuring their health in the same way as you?

What most people miss when embarking on their health journey is recognizing that there is a need to define what healthy looks like for themselves, by themselves. Because the…

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Kaki Okumura
Kaki Okumura

Written by Kaki Okumura

Born in Dallas, raised in New York and Tokyo. I care about helping others learn to live a better, healthier life. My site: www.kakikata.space 🌱

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