The Real Secret to Weight Loss - Final Part Physical Wellness

We’ve finally arrived at the most well known dimension of wellness. As you can now see, your weight loss and overall heath is a lot more than diet and exercise. as a matter of fact, even your physical wellness is more than diet and exercise. Physical wellness promotes the balance of physical activity, nutrition and mental well-being.

I’ve spent many years in the health and wellness industry, studied behavior change in college, and learned the importance of overall health and wellness. Until the last few years, I didn’t realize the impacts that each area had in my ability to be happy with myself inside and out. I’ve focused and taught people to focus on exercising 5-6 days a week and count their calories. I always felt weird about that, because each person is different, but the industry says that “exercising and eating right is key to a happy life”. How do we not all fall victim to that? The truth is that exercising and eating right are a very very small part in what makes you physically healthy and an even smaller part of what makes you love yourself.

One often neglected area within physical health is your mental strength. Your mental well-being is as important, if not more important, than your exercise and eating habits. Think about those days after a night with little to no sleep, or even those days you just feel exhausted – How likely are we to make a decision that benefits our body or emotions when we are consumed by the mental fog that lack of sleep causes? Without a strong mind, we lack the ability to overcome the feelings of being too tired to go to the gym or skip the cookie after dinner.

Understanding the relationship between your body’s health and your mental health is critical to your wellness success. As you work to improve your physical wellness, you’ll learn to understand how your body performs and be able to connect it to how you’re feeling mentally.

Each step you take in this dimension of wellness will improve you health and knowledge about yourself. You’ll find your unique fitness and dietary needs and stop falling victim to the next diet/weight loss fad. Your body knows what it needs – pay attention and try a few of these to help:

Use stairs instead of the elevator
Learn to recognize when your body is feeling ill
Eat a variety of healthy foods and control portion sizes
Maintain regular sleep (between 7-9 hours) and pay attention to your attitude when it’s less than that
Engage in physical activity every day for at least 30 minutes (my body doesn’t require intense activity – what does your body need?)

In the last few years I’ve been able to rediscover the gaps in my overall health. Once I remembered that my health and weight weren’t determined by my diet alone but by the pains in other ares of my life, I was able to start my transformation inside first and then out. I’m reconnecting with God, discovering my purpose, learning how to improve communication, and how to stop being part of events and situations that don’t help me be my best self. I don’t struggle with my weight anymore, even though it still is on my mind because of all the years it was a focus, but my weight doesn’t matter as much as the success I am feeling in my overall health! I am happy with myself, I will continue to grow, as I encourage all of you to do.