What is Wellness to You?

With all the drama and discussion going on in the blogosphere about what is healthy living, I thought I’d take a minute to talk about wellness – which I think is a little different. I think sometimes when we say healthy living, our minds automatically think of organic food, exercise and maintaining the right weight.

The company I work for actually started a Wellness Fits program here (hurray!) for our employees. The goal of the program is to make “wellness fit” into your life, no matter how busy you are. I was tasked with writing an article about the program for our employee newsletter and so I asked some of the employees to give me quotes about what wellness means to them. And while some people did talk about food and weight, some other terms popped up like: balance, spirituality, sense of self, etc.

Being that I asked them to tell me about wellness, I decided that I should look at what wellness means to me. What I realized is that it sort of changes quite a bit for me. There’s no standard equation to my day that will make me feel like I’ve practiced or accomplished complete wellness. Some of the factors that influence my personal wellness seem to be:

• Exercise/Fitness: Big one! Getting exercise 3-5 times a week helps keep me happy and well. 
• Food: Eating natural, real food as opposed to processed foods and eating the appropriate amount for my body.
• Relationships: If there is unrest or arguments going on in any of my relationships, things just don’t feel right.
• Creative Balance: For me, this means reading a book, blogging, enjoying a good movie, etc. I need some of this everyday to feel balanced.
• Work Success: I know this isn’t part of it for some people, but if I feel like I’ve had a bad day at the office, not accomplished much, failed at a task, etc., my overall wellness feels off.
• Overall Health: Visiting doctors for yearly check-up, recognizing when I’m sick and in need of care, etc.
• Rest: If I get less than 7 hours of sleep at night, I can tell the difference in my body and behavior the next day.

So that’s a very quick peak into what wellness means for me. And I know what many people will say when looking at this list – what about the spiritual side? My answer is: that is still something I am working on personally to determine how it impacts my wellness, so I didn’t want to include it here just yet.

So what about you? What does wellness mean in your life?

And lastly, I’ll leave you for the day with some health in the news…

• Even Benefits Don’t Tempt Us to Vegetables
• Dieting? More Sleep Helps Burn Fat
• Meat diets pose environmental danger: report
• The 7 best fat-blasters