Hello Friends! Here we are again, well into February. I hope everybody has had a wonderful Valentine and you made the most of it. This is the time we show each others how much we love them. Sometimes however we miss someone just as important and we forget to love ourselves. I want to touch on self wellness and some of the journeys fitness can lead us.
It’s a journey that takes patience first and foremost best said by, Joey Carter from Blackshear. “The most important one word in training and getting our eating and weight in order is patients.” Joey Carter. I agree Joey one hundred percent. The process of getting healthy is scientific…. simply put the numbers work. There is no magic pill or teas that you can take to make you instantly smaller or fitter. It takes discipline, hard work and lots of patients. Patients with yourself and with the process. It takes a routine of healthy eating and a good workout plan to achieve results. This means incorporating the gym into your daily life and keeping a regimented meal plan. There will be days you decide that it’s just too hard but that’s when you dig deeper, give yourself a hug and wait out the storm within. Even superheros need a break from time to time.
During the whole process somewhere along the way sometimes we get unrealistic expectations. This doesn’t happen with everybody but there are those that decide they like the “whole controlling” what they eat and how long they can workout. It becomes a control issue and not part of a healthy lifestyle. Usually it’s a person that has or had aspects in their lives that they can not control and felt week or vulnerable. It affects all age groups, males and females. This is part of the unhealthy lifestyle in the fitness world locally and globally. We see thin models on run ways and athletes with extremely low body fat on covers of magazines and commercials that portray happy and healthy people falsely. There is a difference in “to thin” and a healthy small frame person. We mislabel people. Let me clarify that what I’m talking about are unhealthy people at the moment. You can not compare yourself with a cookie cutter image to be healthy and have well being.
Well being starts from the inside. Change the inside and the outside will follow. The way we feel and how we see ourselves translates to how we treat others. A person that has a healthy self love can love others and finds joy in others becoming happy. The definition to well being is the state of being comfortable, healthy, or happy. There are five dimensions to health and wellness and they are physical, emotional/mental, intellectual, social and spiritual.
The physical and emotional/mental are pretty much self explanatory but I would like to elaborate on the other three dimensions. The intellectual aspect would be in the sense that you are free from illness that invade the brain. A person with intellectual wellness is generally characterized as informed instead of ignorant. The other, social wellness would mean involved with other people and relationships in a positive way that enhances the quality of life for all people involved in the interaction including yourself. Spiritual wellness is your ability to establish a value system and act on the system of beliefs. It’s based on believing that God is faithful and constant. A person fulfilled instead of unfulfilled would be spiritually well. Growing up in a home that put God first, my belief system was established early on and with a conviction that God along was my salvation. This is how I’ve raised my two sons. To walk this life along without God must be a very lonely and a hopeless place. Isaiah 12:2 said’s, “Behold, God is my salvation, I will trust, and will not be afraid; For the Lord God is my strength and song, And he has become my salvation.
My journey into being physically healthy started way before my journey into well being ever took place. In fact I didn’t know that my well being was infracted until well after I understood the dimensions of being healthy. Being healthy and staying healthy is a daily process. Some days you will feel complete and whole, ready to take on the world. Other days you’ll feel tired and vulnerable. This is a normal and expect it. Being able to recognise that your tired and knowing that you need and allowing yourself that rest is healthy and part of a well being.
There is a line in the Snow white movie that the Queen said, “Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” Being healthy and having well being does not need a mirror nor does it judge others. It doesn’t look to the past nor does it look to the future. Being truly happy, healthy and having a sense of well being is being happy in the now. Its being happy for those that achieve better and building up one another. Knowing who God is and having hope, peace and love. You don’t have to have everything you want but having what you need, having someone to love and hopefully love you back.
I hope in your journey to health and well being that you find these things as well but more than that I hope you find that at the end of your travels you have no regrets. That you lived.
Be Better Fitness 