What is the difference between fitness and health?

Answer 1

Basically, this two things can be correlated. Being health can be a consequence of being fit. In other words, having your body trained proportionate quality of life for yourself and your mind.

Answer 2

The World Health Organization defines health as "a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity." To fully answer your question, then, you may chose to refine it to "What is the difference between Physical Health and Physical Fitness?"

Even within these parameters, Fitness is one component of Health. And in turn, Fitness has a number of components: "Fit for what?" Endurance, strenght, and flexibility are three components of Fitness. Generally, though, Fitness can be defined as the capacity to do effort, work or exercise. Physical Health might be defined as the resistance to illnesses; the capacity of your immune system, but even within the confines of Physical Health, it is not just "the absence of disease or infirmity"

To extend this to the original answer, health might be thought of as the ability of your body to recover from diseases like a cold, but it is so much more than that. Alternately, fitness might be seen as your ability to recover from doing strenuous exercise (the quicker your heart rate gets back to normal, the fitter you are), but it, too, is much more than that. Fitness is one aspect of Health, generally mediated through the fitness of your heart and circulatory system, lungs, and muscles.

You can be fit but not healthy, you can be healthy but not fit or you can be both. Also disabled or paralysed people are considered to be healthy.