Staying Healthy When You Live In a Remote Area

While life in a big city can be exciting and rewarding, more and more Americans choose to live away from urban landscapes. While there are a lot of advantages to having a rural American home, for approximately 60 million people, this also means not having access to any of the benefits of city living. 

In other words, you need to be prepared for the challenges and, more importantly, for how these challenges are going to affect your health. Ultimately, not having shops in the vicinity, for example, can make it tough to build a healthy diet. Similar principles apply to different aspects of rural living. When you are away from modern infrastructure and services, how do you cope to maintain your health? 

Here, you’ll find a few ideas to help you stay on top of your health even in rural America. 

Growing Your Own Food

The first question you are going to have to tackle is how to manage food supply. When grocery stores are a long drive away, you need to get smart, especially because fresh produce is not necessarily a given. 

The good thing about rural life is space. Typically, homeowners have plenty of field space to build up their own food supplies. The easiest and fastest wya is to grow your own vegetables. This not only gives you direct access to fresh produce, but you are also in control of your harvest. This means nutritious, chemical-free food guaranteed with zero distance to travel. 

Ideally, you want to focus first on crops that will thrive in your climate and soil, and these typically include some staples like potatoes, carrots, onions, and leafy greens. These are also easy to grow for beginners. 

It also pays off to invest in additional structures, such as a storage area for your vegetables, a greenhouse, and even a coop if you want to diversify your food supplies with fresh eggs. 

Staying Active

This comes as a surprise to no one: Managing your own food supply is hard work. But this is a good thing, as physical activity plays a big role in your health. By staying physically active, you are also reducing potential health risks that people living a sedentary life face. 

Also, it’s important to draw a clear distinction. Growing vegetables and keeping hens for yourself is tough work, but the workload remains manageable compared to starting a farm business. The key here is to focus on food supply quantities for personal use rather than for the market. 

Besides, as you are surrounded by nature, this can also benefit your mental health, ensuring you get plenty of fresh air and direct sunlight. This may not seem like much, but compared to city dwellers, it is a substantial difference in lifestyle, and this directly improves your health, both physically and mentally. 

Going Off-Grid

Remote areas typically come with spotty infrastructure. Power goes out for longer than it should, water lines can take an eternity to get fixed, and if something goes wrong, you could be waiting weeks for a technician to show up. That’s exactly why a lot of households choose to cut back on their dependence on outside infrastructure and move toward a more self-sufficient lifestyle.

At the end of the day, off-grid living is about taking care of the basics yourself. So, solar panels, wind turbines, and battery storage solutions can be a lifesaver. 

It’s not just electricity, though. Water access is another huge concern. Having a well, collecting rainwater, or just a filtration system can make all the difference. Similarly, sorting out running water also means considering water waste solutions. Off-the-grid households typically need septic tanks or composting toilets.

But when you know you can power your house, get your hot water going, and otherwise take care of the basics without having to rely on unpredictable outside services to sort things out, you get a sense of real peace of mind. That’s especially important in the country, where being without electricity or running water for several days or weeks can have a dramatic health impact. 

Keeping on Top of Medical Care

Living away from the city makes it tough to find routine healthcare services. In fact, you might find yourself driving several hours just for a medical check-up. Distance can become a barrier to health management. 

Thankfully, the pandemic has helped spread the idea of telehealth, making it easier to arrange for virtual appointments in hearing care and any other health concerns. This is a great approach for many remote households who can keep track of their check-ups and follow-up appointments from home. 

Naturally, you can’t run all medical appointments through telehealth, and you will need to arrange for in-person visits for specific things. But for routine checkups and simple consultations, this has been a game-changer, helping the rural community stay healthy without the burden of traveling to the city. 

Stay Connected

Physical health plays, of course, a big role, but let’s not forget mental health. Your emotional wellbeing may benefit from being in nature when you live in rural America, but you can feel disconnected from your loved ones who have stayed in the city. 

Securing a stable and reliable connection with the external world is not negotiable. Thankfully, the days when there were no other options than relying on older infrastructures to keep a landline are long gone.

Nowadays, you can find specific cell phone services that are designed to work in remote areas, which means that rural America can now have 5 bars on the phone. 

Similarly, access to the internet has also improved greatly, as more and more households are looking into satellite-based solutions that are more effective than the typical broadband infrastructure. 

As silly as it may sound, being able to reach out to friends and relatives easily, even when you live far away, makes a big difference to your mental health. You may live in an isolated area, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need a human connection. 

In conclusion, rural living has changed a lot in the last few decades. The idea that living on the countryside isolates you from people, essential services, and convenient facilities is not accurate anymore. That being said, it takes work and effort to build a rural life that puts your health first, but it is possible in 2025.