What IS Health Anyway?

I started writing and thought this one is going to be relatively straight forward.  Other than self-improvement in financial areas, self-improvement in health seems to be the most cut and dry topic.  After all, science has answers to this one, right?  There are like thirty billion books on the subject (half of which I feel like I have read).  One of the largest industries in the world is the health care industry.  Clearly, there must be some sort of agreed-upon list out on the interweb: Criteria By Which To Determine If One is Healthy, complete with a checklist and some simple math equations from which I can make a very easy goals list, maybe making some adaptations or additions according to personal or philosophical preferences (like eating organic, etc).  I figured the hard part would be accomplishing the goals or making it fit into my lifestyle, not the actually act of making the freaking list.

Boy, was I mistaken. 

I mean, if I ask any person in a Weight Watchers meeting or at the gym or at the Whole Foods salad bar,  "Why are you doing what you are doing right now?", he/she will say (quite obviously) "Because I want to be healthy."  Why am I writing this?  Because I want to be healthy.  Now I have to fess up.  I don't even know what that is.  Am I just reaching for some kind of transient idea that is neither attainable nor unattainable?  I set out this week to get that criteria because I simply want to know when I've attained it--I want to know when I'm healthy (and, conversely, when I'm not so I can fix it).  Of course I know what a healthy weight and BMI are, but weight is not all that health is.  It just happens to be the one that most of us are obsessed with at this moment in history.  It's because of this cultural obsession, and potential bias, that I want to take the subjectivity out of it as best I can, and not just go by "I'm in my BMI range and I feel fine." 

Turns out I'm going to be slightly disappointed.  The criteria for determining overall health is simply going to be much more subjective than I was be generally lead to believe, even in the medical industry.  There are some things out there that pretty much everyone agrees upon, but the rest of it is really left to me to decide subjectively.  Greeeaaat.  More decisions.  What joy is mine.