To me healthy living means freedom. Freedom to spread compost without worrying about breathing Legionnaire's Disease spores. I want to dig a hole ready for a transplant using my hands, without worrying about tetanus. I want to be free to party in a roomful of people who mostly have the flu without catching the flu myself. And most of all, freedom from having to make medical appointments.
If I climb a tree and gash my leg open on the bark (yes I still climb trees at 66 years old) I want to be able to ignore sterile precautions and get on with my fun.
When I visit Bali, I don't want to have my holiday ruined by Bali-belly. That's not a tourist attraction!
A Healthy lifestyle means going on a sea cruise without danger of sea-sickness, or having a pregnancy without morning sickness. (Ginger prevents both, better than any drug can.)
My enjoyment of life depends on being able to clamber along muddy banks at night to snare marron (a kind of freshwater crayfish), ride a horse on a kangaroo hunt, or risk a dog-bite without any unhealthy consequences.
My lifestyle called for walking an hour or two each evening, but the sandals I bought wore out after only 8 weeks, and the new ones gave me weeping sores on my feet for 2 weeks as I got used to them. That wasn't my idea of good health - a quarter of my time in pain! Now I walk barefoot. Every few months I have to dig broken glass out of a foot with a needle when I get home. That is a minor matter, and it never gets infected.
My enjoyment of life means I like to keep trying new things. I've eaten witchetty grubs, kangaroo meat, whale meat, crocodile meat, snails, sea-snails, nettles, purslane, sow thistle, natto (when you pick up a forkful you get long strings of slime hanging down) the underground runners of bracken, fat-hen, pig-weed, flowers from violets, roses, day-lilly, pansy, pumpkin... the list goes on. Healthy living means that I can try any of these without worrying about it.
The worries start of course when you have a family. Should you call the poisons center when little Johnny drinks a bottle of ink? Even then, if your lifestyle is really healthy you will have healthy families.
