A Healthy Approach to Health for the New Year

Understanding what is truly healthy, forms the basis of building the best health approach for you and your family. When you say you want to be healthy, have you ever really thought about what that means? The truth is, that in our efforts to be healthy, we are often doing the opposite. You cannot become more stressed in order to be healthy, it just doesn’t work, yet we try to do it anyway. What we make the mistake of doing is narrowing health down to one particular area, and it is usual nutrition, exercise, or a combination of the two. How often have we heard that we need good diet and exercise to be healthy, fit and strong? What we are actually in doing is putting a lot of pressure on ourselves in these areas, and setting ideals that are often unachievable. Add to that the fact that advertisers know how to target their advertisements in just the right way to make us feel the right amount of bad about ourselves so that we need their products in order to be better. Social media works in roughly the same way, we are flooded with depictions of peoples lives that are often very far from reality, so that what we are striving for doesn’t even really exist.

We cannot figure out what healthy is by choosing one thing and critiquing it as healthy or not, this is not a concept that is absolute. We figure out what is healthy by looking at our life as a whole, and once we see the puzzle all put together, we decide if the end result is healthy overall. If it isn’t then we rearrange the pieces until they fit. Taking this whole life approach is what leads you to true, sustainable change. If you hate your job and despise going to work each day, adding spirulina into your morning smoothie is not going to fix that. If you are so busy with work that you have no time to socialise and connect with your friends, going keto is not going to fix that. We need to do the hard work, and that is creating a healthy life, rather than a stressful and overwhelming life with lots of healthy habits thrown on like bandaids. For me, I like to keep it quite simple. Healthy is living a long, happy life, healthy in body and in mind, with joy and connection, and following my life's purpose. So use the beginning of a new year as a time to reflect on what healthy really means for you, and before you commit to a fast, or an intense exercise regime that is not sustainable, look at whether it truly serves your overall health. 

Live Q&A A Fresh approach to health priorities: WATCH HERE