Living Life Balanced

Living Life Balanced...what does that mean exactly? It depends who you ask! A balanced lifestyle is going to look different for every individual person. For me, it means being healthy; mind, body and soul.

Digging a little deeper...it means that I am happy with what I am doing daily, that I am being a good person, that I feel a connection with my family, friends and community and that I feel healthy and energized each day. 

There are 9 dimensions of wellness and each one is interconnected with the other. If one is thrown off, it is likely to impact most of the others. The 9 dimensions include:

• Physical wellness - makes healthy decisions on a daily basis regarding nutrition, activity, sleep, visits their doctors routinely, is aware of their limitations and makes healthy sexual decisions based off their personal values and beliefs. 
• Emotional wellness - expresses and manages their entire range of feelings, has high self-esteem, positive body-image, knows how to regulate their feelings and seeks support regarding their mental health if needed. 
• Intellectual wellness - engages in lifelong learning, seeks knowledge and activities to further enhance their critical thinking and global awareness and engage in activities associated with the arts, philosophy and reasoning.
• Spiritual wellness - has a core set of beliefs, which guide their decision making and other faith based endeavors and understand and respect others may have a distinctly different set of principles. 
• Social wellness - builds healthy relationships based on interdependence, trust and respect, is aware of the feelings of others and develops a network of friends.
• Environmental wellness - appreciates the external cues and stimuli that an environment can provide, recognizes the limits to controlling an environment and seeks to understand the role they play in it.
• Occupational wellness - enjoys the pursuit of a career they believe to be fulfilling on a variety of levels, finds satisfaction and enrichment in work and is always in pursuit of opportunities to reach their goals.
• Financial wellness - is fully aware of their current financial state and sets long and short-term goals regarding finances to achieve self-defined financial success. 
• Cultural wellness - is aware of their own cultural background, as well as the diversity and richness present in other cultural backgrounds and respects diversity.

While I mainly help others focus on the physical aspects of wellness, I also help to look into the other dimensions to provide an overall balance for my clients. ​

In the physical dimension, I help others to see that there is no such thing as being perfect...and that is ok! You have to do the best with what you can and try to be a little better each day. There is also no such thing as the perfect diet. The key to a healthy diet is variety. Eat a variety of fruits, vegetables, proteins - mainly whole foods, but also understand that a treat here and there is not a problem. Enjoy your pizza, burger, chips, beer, wine, chocolate, cookies etc., just do so in moderation. Aim to keep about 80% of your diet clean and enjoy whatever you want for the other 20%. This will help to keep you sane, from binge eating and craving the "unhealthy" food/drinks. If you go 100% all in, you can only keep that up for so long without reaching a breaking point. That is the problem with fad diets, restricting foods and/or cutting too many calories.

Be active in the way that fits you best. If you hate the exercises you are doing, you won't keep it up. Find what you love (or at least like or tolerate) and work on that. Try to get at least 30 minutes of activity 5 days a week. Does that seem out of reach for you? Then just try to do a little more than you did yesterday, move your body, feel alive! 

Aim to get 7-9 hours of sleep each night. Make it a priority, keep working at it until it is a routine. Sleep is so important to all aspects of your life and helps to provide the energy you need to do everything else during your day. 

Don't forget to visit your doctor! Do you go to your primary care doctor, eye doctor, dentist, dermatologist, etc. routinely? If not, start going! Take care of yourself - an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. 

Again, you don't have to be perfect, just do a little better than you did yesterday.

​Eat well, live well, be happy, love others, love yourself. 
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