Diet Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to Nutritional Choices
Diet Demystified: A Comprehensive Guide to Nutritional Choices
Blog Article
You’ve probably heard the terms health and wellness tossed around, often interchangeably. Most people in our society use these words as though they mean the same thing. But there are actually some key differences between the two.
Understanding the difference between health and wellness can help you get clarity on your goals, create a plan that makes sense for you, and start to build a quality of life that is sustainable and that you can do for a lifetime.
So what is the difference between health and wellness? Let’s dive right in.
The Definitions of Health and Wellness
Health is an excellent place to start on your path to wellness. It’s important not to confuse the two however. It’s possible to be in perfect health, yet to not also experience overall wellness. Health is a component of wellness, but wellness is an overarching intention and attention to all areas of your life.
Health
In the past, Balance plates was defined as the absence of disease or infirmity, though the definition of health has been expanded to include a healthy mental state, as well.
Health is focused more on your physical body and how well-functioning it is—or is not. Your health involves the way you eat (your nutrition), how you move your body (exercise), and the absence of acute or chronic diseases.
Wellness
The definition of wellness is an active concept that describes living a healthy lifestyle and achieving your full potential.
Wellness is more concerned with a lifestyle that produces well-being. A wellness lifestyle is doable whether you have perfect health or you’re struggling with a chronic illness. Wellness is about all aspects of your life, as well — your body, your work, your relationships, your emotional life, and so much more.
Together, health and wellness can help you achieve a high quality of well-being. Focusing on wellness specifically can help you to also achieve good health for a lifetime.
What Is the Difference Between Health and Wellness?
While health focuses more on diseases, genetics, and illness (and, hopefully, the lack of health problems!), the concept of wellness is focused on digging into all areas of your life to continuously seek balance.
For example, you might be physically fit and free from disease, but your emotional well-being is suffering. Wellness programs address every aspect of life so that you can always be reaching an improved state of health and well-being.
You can also have physical health without enjoying physical wellness. Just because you’re not suffering from a major issue like heart disease or running to the doctor for aches and pains doesn’t mean that your body is fit and nourished.
We all need to work toward both states in order to get to a place where we are truly healthy and well.
Examples of health factors might include genetics and heritable health disorders, the environment you grew up in, the local foods available to you, and any current acute or chronic illnesses you’re experiencing.
Examples of wellness factors might include eating intentionally and as clean as feels mentally healthy for you, choosing to move your body every day in joyful ways, working on your issues so you can experience better relationships, and choosing a career that supports your wellbeing and influences those around you in healthy ways.
Before you set out to improve your health and wellness, it can be an effective strategy to go deep into understanding the why behind your goals. Sometimes goal setting and achieving can feel really challenging, so getting clear on your purpose and intention can help you keep with it.
You might ask yourself some questions, such as:
- What are the top 3 sources of my stress and what would it feel like to transform those experiences?
- What is the origin of my dysfunctional eating patterns and have I noticed any particular emotional triggers?
- If I want to lose weight, how will I set myself up for success and create weight loss intentions that are reasonable and sustainable?
- If I’m ready to switch careers to something healthier, what small step goals can I map out to make it feel less scary and more empowering?
- Even if I have a chronic disease, what are the top 5 ways I can nourish myself and make peace with my body?
Getting to the source of experiences is the way of a solid wellness practice. By setting your intentions from a perspective of root cause and building out your plans with that understanding and a lot of grace, you’ll have far more success in the long run.
What are the 3 Dimensions of Health?
There are a number of dimensions of health that could be listed out, but there are 3 primary ones that most people reference when discussing health.
These include:
- Physical health
- Mental health
- Emotional health
Most articles on how to improve your health focus on one of these categories. These could include tips for improving your nutrition, physical activity and exercise, getting help with mental issues, or becoming more emotionally intelligent.
These are common themes in health overall, however they don’t fully capture the span of the human experience in the way that wellness does.
Physical Health
The ways in which you experience your body are so important to your overall health and physical fitness. In our society, it’s easy to be checked out from our bodies, always attempting to cover up symptoms and ignore sensations.
Physical health is all about paying attention to your body. To improve your physical health, you might work with a doctor or other healthcare practitioner to identify illness or other issues. You might also just focus on eating a balanced diet and moving your body every day so that you don’t fall into a sedentary lifestyle. Physical health and vitality is a key cornerstone aspect of overall well-being.
Mental Health
While it’s easy to jump straight to eating better and exercising when you think of health, the well-being of your mind is also crucial to overall health. You could take exquisite care of your body, but if you haven’t addressed any mental blocks, mindset hangups, or past traumas, you might not be successful at overall well-being in the long run.
You also nourish your mind through the choices you make in nourishing your body (the mind-gut connection is an important one to learn about!). Mental health is equally as important in your wellness journey as physical health is.
Emotional Health
Your emotions are part of your mental health, but they are a specific aspect of mental health to pay attention to. Just because you’ve resolved childhood traumas or poor mental patterns, it doesn’t mean that you’ve become emotionally intelligent.
You will also need to retrain your brain to function in emotionally appropriate ways throughout all of your present day life and beyond. Taking good care of your emotions can have a huge impact on your ability to achieve well-being
What are the 12 Dimensions of Wellness?
Wellness is a far more broad spectrum that includes all aspects of being alive. By creating “health” in every aspect of wellness, you’ll find yourself improving your life, your body, and your overall well-being. You’ll find a new dimension of health and wellness that you might have never thought possible before.
These dimensions of wellness include:
- Body
- Food
- Rest
- Water
- Sun
- Air
- Mindset
- Career
- Relationships
- Finances
- Spirituality
- Purpose
Some interpretations of wellness don’t include all of these elements or may try to combine them together, but we feel that this is the most comprehensive, holistic way to think about wellness. At the IAWP, we combine these 12 elements into our unique Wellness 360 System to create the most inclusive view of wellness possible. We also go much deeper into each element and explore them across three layers and 36 dimensions of the self (more on that later!)
For now, let’s jump in to what they mean so you can better understand how to work on your wellness.
Wellness Dimension 1: Body
Your body is how you interact with the world around you, so it’s important to keep it in as good a shape as possible. This dimension includes what you put into your body and what you do with the outside of your body as well. This can include nutrition, movement and exercise that feels good for you, the products you use on your skin and hair, supplements and products you use to improve your body, and your overall upkeep and perspective of your body.
Wellness Dimension 2: Food
Nutrition is a tricky puzzle to solve, especially as we’re all biochemically, environmentally, and genetically unique. But it’s one of the most important ways to improve how your body feels and functions. Understanding what makes you feel great, what you love to eat, and how to prepare foods that are nutritionally dense is the key to using food as your superpower toward wellness.
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