Why the Wellness Lifestyle

Happy New Year !! My apologies I have been off the radar for a few weeks. I have been brewing some incredible ideas and spending lots of time with my family over the holidays. Taking time to reflect and celebrate the accomplishments and wins of 2017 has been a process. Closing out this past year has been a work of love. It is all worth it. Once the New year began I have been consumed with manifesting my vision for 2018. I had this idea to post a daily, weekly, monthly self-care protocol and then I realized that there must be some background on why we even need a wellness lifestyle. Be sure to read before I go into the nitty gritty details in my next post.

Alas, my first post of the year.

What does it mean to be well? Wellness can be characterized by not merely the absence of disease, but by feeling good and enjoying one’s life. How you feel – physically, mentally and emotionally – determines the state of your overall health and well being. It might be said that your health is your greatest asset, since it affects how you think, feel, move, interact, prosper, and achieve. When you don’t feel well, every other aspect of your life is impacted.

Poor lifestyle habits put people at risk for virtually every physical and mental illness. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that heart disease is the leading cause of death for men and women, accounting for one in every four deaths, in the U.S. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 75-90 percent of all doctor office visits in the U.S. are for stress-related ailments and complaints.

Sometimes major life events, such as divorce, loss of a loved one, financial problems, or the birth of a child, can combine with genetic or biological predispositions to prompt a stress-related health crisis. This was the case for me , and I will write about it more in the future. Our culture often encourages a dependence on doctors, drugs, and health care systems to fix and heal these physical and emotional ailments. Yet it is widely known and accepted within the medical community that learned behaviors and lifestyle choices, such as poor stress management, inadequate nutrition, physical inactivity, insufficient sleep, smoking, and excessive alcohol consumption, are major contributors to illness and a diminished quality of life.

Modern medicine tends to fixate on diagnosis and treatment, whereas a wellness lifestyle focuses on education, self-awareness, and prevention. Instead of merely treating disease, the wellness lifestyle addresses its causes – what lies beneath the disease and its symptoms. Our thoughts, feelings, beliefs, habits, and choices are fueling the fires of inflammation, pain, toxicity, and illness in the body. By addressing the root causes of disease rather than merely treating the symptoms we can assist the body in healing itself.

The wave of the future is Integrative Medicine, wherein traditional allopathic treatments work in conjunction with alternative, non-traditional practices to treat the whole person instead of just the disease. In this way, patients and practitioners form a partnership whose goal is to treat the mind, body, and spirit, all at the same time!

Your body is capable of healing itself naturally. Most times, it does not need synthetic medications to take over its job, but simply the right support tools that enable it to do what it was engineered to do. The key to wellness is simply learning what serves the body, then restoring to the body what it needs. This will yield lasting healing and continued wellness.

Plant remedies, known as essential oils, have been used throughout the world for millennia and are one of nature’s most powerful support tools available to help your body heal itself. Essential oils can be used in many aspects of our daily lives. Typical uses include cleaning, cooking, skin care, animal care, cleansing and uplifting the air in a room, and supporting the emotional and physical needs of the body.

The overall quality of essential oils is very important when using them therapeutically. the most important factor when selecting essential oils is that they be tested and certified to be pure, potent, genuine, and authentic.

The bottom line to wellness is that each and every day you make choices that affect your health. Ultimately your health rests in your hands. You have the power to live a life of optimal health. I invite you to join me in living the wellness lifestyle. Your journey to health and wellness begins here.

❤️