My Personal Definition Of “Wellness”

Look– Yoga Top // Pants (similar)

Onzie top that I can’t get enough of! To keep things simple, it has a built in bra and is the perfect length when paired with high waisted leggings. 🙂

Hi Lovelies!

Today I wanted to chat about a term that I think gets thrown around a lot today, a term that is pretty darn important to me. This term is, “wellness.” This term is important to me for a plethora of reasons, the main one being that I haven’t always had a healthy or accurate view of what it means to be “well” or to practice “wellness.” A few years ago, I was under the impression that the term wellness had mostly to do with the way that we look, how “in shape” we are, or how flat our tummies are. Today, I’m here to point out that how “wellness” minded we are (for me personally) actually has very little (nothing??) to do with those physical things, but has everything to do with the way that we FEEL.

I’ve grown to see that my personal definition of wellness has much more to do with how gentle, loving, forgiving, etc. I am on myself.

All of the wellness practices I have in place in my life are there because of the way they make me FEEL. For example, exercising because it’s an incredible stress relief, eating a high fat diet because my brain LOVES it, bulletproof coffee because it’s easier on my nervous system. Shifting my views of wellness to always measuring things through the lense of “how does this make me feel” has been one of the most helpful practices in healing my relationship to my body and to my previous perception of “wellness,” along with healing the negative cycle I was once in of doing things because I wanted my body to look a certain way.

Soooo, the point of this post today is to hopefully help you to check in with yourself and to possibly to reevaluate some of the “wellness” practices you might have in your own life. Do you HATE the workout you do 6 times per week? Do you dislike the way you feel after you eat a certain way? Rather than forcing yourself to keep doing these things and turning a blind eye to them, I challenge you to give yourself the grace you DESERVE and replace them with things that bring you joy!! If you passionately hate weight training, why not try something completely opposite, like pilates.

I was talking on Instagram today about the way that I try to “schedule” my workouts as little as I possibly can. I’ve found it works better for me to tune into what my body is wanting on a given day. Some days I crave a long walk with my dog and other days I feel like a great HIIT workout! Everyday is different and everyONE is different, so this might feel different for you and your body that it does for mine.

Another thing I’ve learned–

Many of the “wellness” practices I have in my life (a few that I listed above) also have the “side effect” of making us look good. Pretty sweet, right?! A second benefit of this whole listening to your body approach to wellness is that when we aren’t “forcing” ourselves to do things, our bodies become less stressed and in turn have lower cortisol levels (the hormone in our body that helps it respond to stress).

As my passions for living a healthy lifestyle have grown, and now have turned into my career, I’ve found myself often contemplating this idea of what “wellness” really is. The conclusion I’ve come to is all centered around the fact that wellness (to me) is about incorporating as many things through out the day that make me feel good. A huge portion of this could be what kinds of foods we nourish our bodies with, what kind of energy we surround ourselves with, making sure that we take the time for ourselves that we need, etc.

I hope this post didn’t ramble too much, just something I’ve been thinking about recently.

Love you guys! <3