Addressing Lifestyle Issues: Thoughts on Adopting a Systems Approach | Biomedgrid

Lifestyle is a social phenomenon. It is the interests, way of thinking, way of living, or orientation to life of an individual, group, community or culture. Lifestyle results from several interacting factors that produce a predisposition to act in certain ways or a certain style of behaving toward one's environment, broadly speaking. One useful way to look at lifestyle is to consider lifestyle as a mediating variable between values and observed behavior. In other words, lifestyle is a way of expressing one's values toward a thing or phenomenon [1]. Take for example health, a healthy life style emanates from the value one places on eating a balanced diet, shopping for the ingredients that make up this balanced diet, regular exercise, avoiding harmful habits, seeking out useful information on achieving and maintaining a healthy lifestyle and the value placed on the opinion of significant others that may influence one's lifestyle choices among many other things. So then, lifestyle as it relates to health is a complex concept; complex in the sense that its expression is the result of several interacting components. Complexity is a primary feature of social phenomena and lifestyle issues whether they relate to health, family or the environment are good everyday examples. Complexity is a staple distinguishing feature of a system, which can be understood along several dimensions.