A healthy lifestyle is an important component of health and well-being. It consists of activities, attitudes, and values that reduce the risk of serious diseases and increase life expectancy. It includes a wide range of behaviours, such as eating healthy food, regular physical activity and avoiding smoking. Unfortunately, it is difficult to define the concept of lifestyle in an unambiguous and widely recognised way. The current definitions, formulated in the context of healthcare, are limited to the behavioural component of choice and do not address psychological, identity, or cycle dimensions. Therefore, it is necessary to rework the concept of lifestyle to create more effective theoretical and explanatory models that are appropriate for health promotion interventions.
Various theories have been proposed to explain the lifestyle phenomenon. Some theories favour a social interpretation and focus on the individual’s position within a specific socioeconomic context (e.g. Weber and Bourdieu). Others, like Veal, consider a variety of daily activities that can be broadly defined.
According to these theories, lifestyle is a combination of behaviours that are selected through an individual’s freedom of choice and that reflect personal preferences, personality traits and the specific circumstances in which they live. However, these theories are based on relatively little empirical data and do not take into account other aspects of the concept of lifestyle such as the temporal dimension and the social and identity components.
Other theories, such as those of the deterministic school, have been developed to analyse the influence of the environment on an individual’s behaviour. They are based on the assumption that an individual’s choices are determined by environmental factors such as the availability of resources, the level of competition and the structure of the economy.
The theories that favour an internal interpretation of the concept of lifestyle emphasise the development of an individual’s personality and the importance of a person’s own perceptions, beliefs and values in their choices and decisions. These include psychoanalytic theories of personality such as those of Adler and Jung, as well as the developmental psychology approach to personality, which defines the lifestyle as a maturation and evolution of an individual’s personality that emerges in adulthood.
The final group of theories, mainly of sociological origin, view the lifestyle as an expression of social class in the form of specific consumption patterns and daily practices. These lifestyles are determined by the needs of society and can be distinguished from other cultures in a country or region through their specific characteristics. The main criticism of this type of model concerns the existence of a fixed set of lifestyles, and in particular that the model is not appropriate for post-modern societies. This model is also criticised for having a primarily economic base and for being based on an outdated idea of social hierarchy [35].
