If you don’t find time for your wellness, you will be forced to find time for your sickness.
My wellness journey started from sickness. 8 months of living in constant excruciating pain, having all sorts of severe allergic reactions, while having all tests negative. Week by week, I was living on pills and hoping for relief that was not coming. Add to this all the perimenopause symptoms that hit you like a train, and you can understand why, at some point, I felt like my body was abandoning me.
One day, I could barely stand up, and even walking was a struggle. But being a mom of 3 kids is a 24/7 job that has no sick leave. I knew I needed to do something and started searching for the answers.
Our body always tells us what it needs, but most of the time, we completely ignore it because there is something else we think is more important – our kids, work, family, business, or our other struggles. “If only I could fix this, I would start to take better care of my health,” -we lie to ourselves to feel better. However, the fact is that without health, you have nothing.
Nothing is more important than your health.
Healthy lifestyle and wellness – what does it mean?
Nowadays, we have an unhealthy and super commercial perception of a “healthy lifestyle” and “wellbeing,” the only purpose of which is to sell. And in the end, it creates so much mental and psychological anxiety around this topic that it drains you instead of helping to get better. One of the most unhealthy ones, I believe, is about weight loss.
I tried many programs, read various articles on the subject, testimonials, and followed health coaches advice, and may had an improvement for a while. But after a short time, all my problems were back, and I felt even worse. The visious cicle changed when I accepted that wellness is a choice and a lifestyle, not a goal or a milestone to reach.
Without even noticing, I came to a holistic approach to healing and well-being. I believe it is an everyday work in progress. Building a healthy lifestyle takes time, and it never stops.
How You Can Start Today
With massive advertising campaigns often selling under the cover of a healthy lifestyle, overpriced and not safe products and beauty procedures, wellness feels expensive and an unaffordable luxury. And not only in terms of money, but also in terms of time. But it is just marketing.
You do not need much time and money to feel good and live good. Wellness has 0 cost if you look at it closely. Sun and air are free, sleeping at night is free, and walking is free. When I changed how I look at wellness, it became easier to implement small changes in my daily life to feel better. But it did not happen overnight. Mentality, or mindset, is the first thing to work on.
When you stop hating how you look, when you stop feeling shame for extra kilos or bad eating habits (or any other thing that you beat yourself up for), you approach the same goal with a different perspective.
Instead of “I want to lose 10 kg and need to exercise, plus go on a diet,” try “how can I give my body more energy and support through healthy food and movement?”. Two nice guided meditations on the Asana Rebel app (very affordable) helped me to do this mindset switch, and do all the improvements in my eating, sleeping, movement habbits from loving and taking good care of my body, not being ashamed of it. I post a screen shot of them below.
Start with the basics. Know where you are standing, what is your starting point? If you have health issues, schedule appointments with your physician or family doctor to do necessary control and check-ups. If you don’t know what the problem is, how can you solve it? Then, when this is taken care of, you can move further and do other adjustments to improve your daily life.
5 Key Elements of a Healthy Lifestyle
You’ve heard it a thousand times. To be healthy, you need to sleep well, eat well, drink enough water, spend time outside, and move your body at least 30 minutes a day. Sounds too simple to be true, and at the same time, too overwhelming to implement in your own life with a hectic rhythm and stressful workload.
Start small and don’t fall for 21- 28 day promises of a miraculous shortcut that will fix everything. Wellness is an everyday “work in progress”. Start with the baby steps you can do now, and every day, improve your wellness for each key element step by step. Important to focus on 1 little adjustment at a time. Otherwise, you will easily burn out, and none of your good intentions will result in new habits. Chasing shortcuts or overdoing it for faster results is not working because it is not sustainable, so it won’t stick.
Simple Baby Steps You Can Do for Your Wellness Today
Choose the area that is the source of the biggest discomfort for you and focus on improving it first. Then, when this area is improved, you can move to the next one. Here are a few examples of what you can do today to start.
Insomnia:
It leads to an increase in anxiety, low energy, feeling always tired, and high irritability. It was the first one I started to work on. All I did to start was spray my favorite perfume on the pillow before going to sleep. I noticed that my favorite smell was calming me down. Then I learnt that lavender oil is very good for falling asleep. It is used for newborn babies who have trouble sleeping, so I decided to try it too. At the end, I improved my sleeping by doing these 4 things altogether:
- Set up the same time for waking up and going to sleep. To arrive at ideal timing took a few weeks, I was changing 10-15 minutes every day until I arrived at my perfect “sleep time” – going to bed 10-10.30 pm and waking up at 6 am. You have your life rhythm, so your ideal timing will look different than mine. But recent studies show that having the same hours for waking up and going to bed is not less important than sleeping for enough time. Regular rhythm helps your body work better.
- Aromatherapy: about 60 minutes before going to bed, I put lavender oil with sticks on the bedside table. 10 minutes before going to sleep, I close the oil bottle and turn the sticks upside down. I leave the sticks on the bedside table in a vase. This way, they still evaporate aroma but not so intensely.
- I open the windows in every room before going to sleep to change the air and to lower the temperature in the house. Sleeping in a room with a temperature of 19-21 degrees C is very helpful.
- Listen to the sounds of wind, rain, or a campfire if you are upset or nervous before going to bed and can’t relax. These sounds I found on the Asana Rebel app, which I mentioned above.
With time, I did not need all 4 elements to sleep better, just n.1 and 3 are the ones I still use every day, adding n. 2 and 4 when I need extra support to relax.
Water consumption:
Track how much water you drink. This habit helped me to increase water consumption and made it automatic. You can use your health app or make 8 dots in your paper agenda. When you drink a glass of water, just cross or circle the dots. No fancy bottles are required. Now (after a year), I do not need to track how much water I drink anymore.
Eating habits:
Try meal planning and instead of restrictions, adding new food (one at a time). For example, replace fried potatoes with fresh vegetables.
I use the Better Me app for this. I have a high-protein meal plan, and the meals are very simple and easy to make, but at the same time, they are so tasty! So, at the end, you are not giving up. You are gaining many benefits, including more tasty and easy-to-prepare dishes that do not cost a fortune.
Here is another inspiration for you: a chef on a private yacht that shares her meals for the day on Instagram – lilyofthegalley. I know, it sounds fancy (private yacht and all). But she uses very simple ingredients, has almost no space and equipment, and still manages to do amazing home-cooked meals. There you can find a lot of healthy, simple-to-make, and yummy ideas for your meals and how to structure your plan.
Movement:
Start slowly and build up on the go. For example, I wanted to start running in the morning this summer. I enrolled in fencing school and need to have a good fitness level to take lessons. Based on the movement I do daily now, the coach advised me to do as follows: “Start with a 30-minute walk 3 times a week. Once you can stick to this, increase the speed gradually, not the time of the training. One day, your body will “ask” you to run, and then you can start running in the morning”. After 3 weeks, I do my 30-minute walk every day (on weekends too), and my speed has improved greatly. I doubled the distance I make in the same time.
Another example: I tried yoga practice on Asana Rebel, and with my current situation, I was dying on the mat even after a short training. I switched to Better Me pilates program and loving it as it helps my body to compensate for 10 hours of sitting at the desk during work days and feels more sustainable. Then, when I train myself enough, I will switch to Asana Rebel for home workouts in the morning (after running). Will still keep Pilates for the evening to sleep better.
Wellness for me is not expensive supplements, diets, spa days, beauty products, and gym sessions. It is not about the clothing size or a number on the scale. It is a lifestyle that allows one to feel joy.
Wellness is based on systems and routines that support your energy, peace, and self-development. I am learning every day to listen to my body and work for it, not against it, and want to share with you my findings in this new blog category.
If you, like me, are looking for the answers to make your life better, I hope my experience will give you fresh ideas or inspiration.