When it comes to health, there are two approaches that you can appreciate – preventative and restorative. Within those two categories, there are thousands of subcategories, but if you approach those two halves as parts of the same whole, you’ll at least have two primary sets of baselines on which to jump off of for your own situations.
There is prevention as a lifestyle or as an initiation. And then there is restoration as a lifestyle or as an initiation. And giving yourself a chance to delineate between the two will start to show you the different pathways that you can take to achieve the same final goal.
Prevention As a Lifestyle
When you’re working on preventative health as a lifestyle, you’re trying to approach health as though it’s something that you already have but that you can lose if you don’t actively maintain positive habits. When you think of prevention is a lifestyle, you imagine yourself doing all of the healthy things that you can concerning your diet and your activities so that you never get sick, and you never get injured. Obviously, this is not going to be a perfect method, and no one can tell the future, but the more preventative health habits you have, the statistically less likely all sorts of different conditions can be.
Prevention As an Initiation
Then there’s prevention as an initiation. If you’re not feeling particularly good about yourself because of your physical condition, you may want to prevent yourself from getting worse. At that point, you have to initiate preventative good habits. Perhaps you’ve never drunk a lot of water in the past. But if you’re choosing prevention as an initiation, then you initiate the practice of drinking lots of water every day, with the intent of preventing future medical issues that occur from dehydration.
Restoration As a Lifestyle
Then there is restoration as a lifestyle. The most obvious example of this would be people who have been through Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. If they follow the plan, the rest of their entire lives are going to be all about restoring sobriety and normalcy. They have already hit rock bottom, and their entire future is made up of restoring themselves to try and be a complete person. After people go through rehab, this may be the only lifestyle that keeps them alive.
Restoration As an Initiation
A final category when it comes to health would be restoration as an initiation. Say you got injured as a soldier and lost a limb to amputation. For health reasons, you may have to get a prosthetic limb and have to learn how to do a lot of basic motions and activities again. If you want to be mentally and physically healthy, you have to initiate the restoration of this movement using the latest scientific and medical techniques.