Maintaining Wellness

Maintaining wellness is important.  But it’s not easy.

What exactly is maintaining wellness?

In this day and age, I can pretty much bet you have a lot on your plate.  I know I do.  So, when it comes to balancing and maintaining wellness with everything else in life, it can be overwhelming, stressful and pretty hard to manage. Kind of like the laundry basket.  Right? Unfortunately, a lot of people are so overwhelmed these days that the last thing they think about is wellness.  But I’m here to tell you it can be done.  Just keep reading the posts, find out more information in bite size pieces.  Figure out which ones are most important and accessible to you at this time in your life.  Then take ONE STEP AT A TIME.  Maintaining wellness isn’t about achieving everything at once or doing it perfectly.  It’s about developing habits, one by one, and maintaining them to the best of your ability.

What Do I Work On? Diet or Exercise?

Maintaining wellness does not necessarily mean either of those.

On top of the overwhelm, many people only think of one or two areas of wellness when they try to address their health. It would appear that the areas people most think about are ‘diet’ and exercise. 

If when I say ‘diet’ you think ‘nutrition’, then you are on the right track of being aware of an important component to wellness.  But if you are like many people and think “when you give up pasta and dessert to lose weight’, that’s not quite it.

And when you hear the word ‘exercise’, are you imagining going to the gym and working out for an hour or two?  Well, that can work for some I guess, but most of us don’t have an hour or two a day to spend at the gym and I’m not convinced that would be best even if I did have the time. 

When I speak of wellness, I’m thinking about several components.

Nourishment

The first part of wellness I’d like to address on this blog is NOURISHMENT.  By that I mean nourishment through food, herbs, and supplements.

There are food products and there is food. Food is what I want to talk about on this blog.  When I say food, I am speaking of foods that come from animals and plants. I am not speaking of food products that come from fast food chains or bags and boxes that contain 15 or more ingredients that not only put toxins into our bodies but do not even provide proper nutrition.

Now there are SOME products that are a combination of foods you can find in a package or bottle.  Please don’t think I’m going to say to make everything from scratch.  That’s too much for a lot of people.  We’ll talk about that more another time.  

In addition to food as a primary source of nutrition, I’d like to cover topics on herbs (some of which are also used as food) and supplements that can be taken to level out what we may be missing in our foods.

Movement

The second part of wellness I’d like to address here is MOVEMENT.  Movement doesn’t have to be walking on the treadmill (though it can be) or lifting weights (but it can be) or running a marathon (but that’s right; it can be). 

It can be as varied as walking out to your mailbox, stretching every 30 minutes while sitting at your office desk, walking around the kitchen while you’re texting with a friend, or taking a nice walk after dinner.

It is truly essential to have movement through your day. More is better but our primary goal is to just make progress. Movement increases our lymph flow, which in turn has a huge impact on our immune system, ridding our bodies of unwanted wastes, and more.

Rest

A third essential part of maintaining wellness is REST. It is not only important to get enough hours of sleep, but we also need to make sure it’s the best quality of sleep we can get. 

Sleep is a part of wellness I struggle with.  But there’s another component of rest.  It’s not just about sleep.  It’s resting from our responsibilities and woes, and even technology. It’s about enjoying life too. I want to cover this part of wellness here as well.

Mind

A fourth and fifth part of maintaining wellness that is just as essential as the 3 elements we’ve covered so far is Mindset and Stress Management. I’m having trouble separating the two here. 

They can be separate and yet the intertwine so intricately. Stress can totally derail your health. You can address all the other factors I’ve noted above and still have health problems if your mindset is negative or you are under a tremendous amount of stress. 

Our body keeps score (there’s actually a great book titled The Body Keeps the Score that you may enjoy if you want to read more about that).  Stress affects our mindset, and our mindset can be a great stress management tool.  So, what I’ve come up with here to cover all of this is the category of MIND.  The category of mind will cover several subcategories including mindset, stress management, gratitude, and more.

Simplicity

One last part of wellness involves our environment.  This one isn’t always in our control but there are things we can do to mitigate or detox from the toxins in our environment.  We ca also declutter, live simply, and minimize the overwhelm by taking baby steps and remembering that imperfect progress is better than no progress.  It’s all about doing the best we can.  This last category will simply be titled SIMPLICITY.  

Maintaining Wellness One Step at a Time

This first introductory post is just a brief summary of the elements of wellness and the focus of this brand-new blog.  Future posts will address one or more of these elements.  And I hope to help you on your wellness journey- one step at a time- to address all these elements, in bite size pieces.  Check out the next post on why I chose the name, My Wellness Basket!