Why insight is the foundation of a healthy lifestyle

Q: What is meant by lifestyle?

Lifestyle refers to behaviours that are known to be associated with health or health problems. This includes your eating and exercise habits, sleep, smoking and alcohol consumption. It mainly concerns habits and behaviours that are repeated over time.

Q: What is a healthy lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle consists of healthy habits that suit your health and personal circumstances and that you can maintain over time. There is therefore no single perfect lifestyle for everyone. Focus on your own patterns and where there may be room for improvement.

Q: What types of lifestyles are there?

There are no fixed lifestyle categories that everyone fits into. Your lifestyle is a combination of your individual habits relating to factors such as diet, physical activity, sleep, smoking and alcohol consumption. This combination differs from person to person.

What is a healthy lifestyle?

A healthy lifestyle consists of behaviours and habits that generally benefit your health. The Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) defines lifestyle as behaviour that has an established relationship with either good health or health problems.

That may sound broad – and it is. Lifestyle includes what you usually eat and drink, how much you move during a typical day, whether you smoke, how much alcohol you drink and how well you sleep.

It is therefore not about one healthy meal or a single workout. Similarly, an evening on the sofa or a meal out does not immediately make your lifestyle unhealthy. What matters most are the patterns that repeat over weeks, months and years.

That is why it is more useful to look at your usual behaviour than at individual good or bad days.

Which lifestyle factors affect your health?

Five important lifestyle factors are physical activity, smoking, alcohol consumption, diet and sleep. According to the RIVM, physical activity, smoking, diet and alcohol consumption in particular have a clear relationship with the development of chronic diseases.

In practice, these factors include:

Physical activity: not just exercise, but also walking, cycling, taking the stairs and how much you sit or move throughout the working day.
Smoking: whether you smoke and how regularly tobacco use forms part of your daily life.
Alcohol: not just how much you drink on one occasion, but particularly your drinking pattern over a longer period.
Diet: your overall eating pattern, including how varied it is and how often you choose fresh foods rather than highly processed products.
Sleep: how long and how well you usually sleep, and whether you wake up feeling rested.

These factors can also influence one another. After a short night’s sleep, for example, you may have less energy to be physically active. A busy working week may mean you opt for convenience foods more often. And someone with a sedentary job may exercise regularly but still spend much of the rest of the day sitting.

This means that lifestyle is not simply the sum of five separate factors. What matters is the overall pattern that emerges when you consider them together.

Why insight is the first step

Improving your lifestyle starts with taking as objective a look as possible at where you are now. After all, how we perceive our lifestyle does not always match our actual behaviour.

A practical way to assess your lifestyle is to avoid asking “Do I live healthily?” and instead ask more specific questions. For example:

What does a typical working day look like: do I spend most of it sitting or do I move regularly?
What do I eat and drink on an average day, not just on my ‘good’ days?
How often do I drink alcohol during a typical week?
Do I usually wake up feeling rested?
Which habits tend to change during busy or stressful periods?

This provides a more realistic picture than simply labelling your lifestyle as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’.

Objective health data can provide additional information. This could include blood pressure, cholesterol and glucose levels, or body composition. These measurements do not directly tell you whether your lifestyle is good or bad, but they can provide insight into health factors that are partly influenced by lifestyle.

This is relevant because lifestyle factors are associated with conditions including type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. You may feel healthy while certain risk factors are already present.

What does a healthy lifestyle look like for you?

A healthy lifestyle does not look exactly the same for everyone. Your age, health, work, family life and other personal circumstances all influence what is achievable and relevant.

Someone who is physically active throughout the working day, for example, has a very different activity pattern from someone who spends eight hours behind a desk. Similarly, someone who regularly works night shifts will have a different sleep routine from someone with fixed working hours. Comparing your lifestyle directly with someone else’s is therefore not always useful.

A better question is: which habit within my current situation offers the greatest opportunity for improvement? For one person, this might mean moving more during the working day, while for another, sleep, diet, alcohol consumption or quitting smoking may be more important. Small changes that you can maintain are generally more realistic than temporarily changing everything at once.

How can you improve your lifestyle in practice?

Improving your lifestyle starts with recognising patterns and deciding what you want to change first. You do not need to change your diet, exercise more, improve your sleep and tackle every other habit at the same time.

Try to make the change specific. ‘I want to live a healthier life’ provides little direction. ‘I notice that I spend almost my entire working day sitting’ gives you a much clearer idea of where there may be room for improvement.

The same applies to diet or sleep. Once you know which pattern you want to change, it becomes easier to identify a realistic adjustment.

Diet as a foundation

Healthy eating is mainly about your overall diet rather than labelling individual foods as healthy or unhealthy. Take a look at a typical week, for example. How varied is your diet? How often do you choose vegetables, fruit and other fresh or minimally processed foods? And when do you mainly opt for convenience?

This often provides more insight than judging a single meal. You do not need to eat perfectly. If your diet is varied throughout the week, a meal out at the weekend does not undo that. Conversely, one healthy salad does not automatically make an otherwise unbalanced diet healthy.

Physical activity, sleep and relaxation

Physical activity and sleep are also part of the broader lifestyle picture.

When it comes to physical activity, look beyond whether or not you exercise. Someone can work out several times a week while still spending hours sitting during most working days. Walking, cycling, taking the stairs and regularly getting up from your desk all contribute to daily movement.

For sleep, consider not only how many hours you spend in bed, but also factors such as regularity and whether you generally wake up feeling rested.

Relaxation also deserves attention. Prolonged periods of stress or a busy schedule can affect everyday habits, such as going to bed later, moving less or opting for convenience foods more often. Recognising these patterns can help you identify where adjustments may be useful.

From lifestyle to insight into your health

How you live and your actual health status are not exactly the same thing. You can have many healthy habits and still have certain health risks, for example due to age or genetic predisposition. Conversely, feeling healthy does not automatically mean that all measurable health factors are favourable.

This is why lifestyle insights and objective health information can complement each other. Your daily habits provide information about your behaviour, while measurements such as blood values, blood pressure or body composition can provide insight into specific aspects of your physical health.

This distinction is important. It prevents health from being assessed solely on how you feel or the assumption that ‘I live a healthy lifestyle, so I must be healthy’.

Do you want to know where you truly stand?

Gaining insight into your habits and your health provides a more concrete starting point when you want to improve your lifestyle. You'll better understand which factors are already going well and where attention might be needed.

Preventive health examination through body scans offers additional information about various aspects of your health. This way, you can decide from an informed perspective which next steps are relevant for your situation. Our most chosen preventive examination is the Prescan Pro program. This program includes extensive MRI examinations combined with laboratory tests and cardiological examinations. Thus, you gain a good understanding of your health and receive tools to actively work on your health.

View our body scans