One of the perpetual issues in health promotion is the issue of compliance. Researchers and practitioners work to understand and identify the mechanisms and find the magic formula for how to achieve that long-term compliance regarding healthy behavior. Since the poststructuralist ‘linguistic turn', language has come to be conceived as performative (rather than representational) and as such is also of great interest in education as a central aspect of learning: language has come to be perceived as central to our way of understanding our world, and how we understand our world may be perceived as central to how we come to act in this world. Hence, how health is talked about may be expected to have an impact on behavior, on compliance. When the notion of ‘health' is discussed, in research and by lay-people, it is often described by using binaries such as health/disease, healthy/unhealthy, risk/resource, etc. In a study on health promotion initiatives in the workplace (Björklund 2008), another binary emerged: risk/pleasure. By drawing on Derrida's notion of différance to interrogate the binary of risk/pleasure this paper seeks to deconstruct this notion of health. This deconstruction exposes expectations that are placed on the recipients of health promotion initiatives.  The analysis also illustrates the dialectical relationship between risk and pleasure and explores inclusive spaces for understanding other ways of thinking about health.