My Wellness Experience
There’s a lot of conflicting, segmented, and surface level information out there about wellness, as I’m sure you know. There are lots of people who want to be well and make self-directed choices toward a healthier and more fulfilling life. But all of the noise can make you feel overwhelmed and really confused about what wellness is and how you can apply it to your life, fully. I know because that’s exactly where I was in 2015.
It was my junior year of college when I began to take health and fitness more seriously. I had started going to the gym on campus regularly in pursuit of my “Beyonce” body, but I quickly realized that I’d need more than YouTube workouts and generic plans. So I got a personal trainer and nutritionist to teach me how to eat, structure my workouts, and lift weights properly, and I made some progress! I learned a lot that still serves me to this day. But I still wanted more. In a world of flat tummy teas, waist trainers, and quite frankly, White women as the gold standard for health, I was looking for the girls with “lived-in” bodies that they loved and melanin like mine who promoted actually being well, not just eating clean and working out.
I had been a dancer my whole life. I danced with a local company, danced at church, took dance as an academic class all four years of high school, and danced on dance teams in high school and college. But in 2015, I decided to stop dancing because I needed time to focus more on school. So I thought “I’ve seen enough on Instagram and YouTube to be able to replicate some routines. I’ll just switch to making the gym my workout location of choice”. It’s easy to get on a treadmill, elliptical, or bike. It’s also easy to find free resources on everything from 20 minute HIIT workouts to how to properly lift weights. But after doing this for about 6 months in 2015 (with a rather rapidly expanding waistline and slowing metabolism), I quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be enough.
I set out on a quest to learn all there was to learn about how to “eat clean” and “train dirty”, what to eat to lose weight and what to avoid, and so on. But it felt like the more I looked, the more confused I became. For every website that said eat eggs for protein and healthy fat, there was another one that said not to eat the yolk because it raises your cholesterol. For every day that I felt confident enough to go to the weight room at the gym on campus and follow a YouTube workout on my phone in pursuit of my Beyoncé body, there was another thin, blonde, green smoothie-drinking white woman popping up on my Instagram feed with a different set of rules and regs. In a world of flat tummy teas and waist trimmers, I was looking for the girls who were healthy and had real bodies like me. The more I looked for women of color in wellness whose stories I could connect to, the more I felt unaccounted for and at times, even unwanted. Wellness was (and still is) a pretty white space.
So, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I studied psychology and human development and quantitative methodology in college, so I dug my heels in and put those skills to use. I researched everything from what resources to trust and what foods to eat to health and wellness professionals who take into account a Black woman’s experiences and genetics when sharing information. I got a trainer who taught me (in-person) how to properly lift weights and how to build my body. I paid a nutritionist to teach me how to eat well, not how to eat to get or stay skinny. For every health-related research article I read, I analyzed their methods and checked to see who they were funded by, quickly eliminating those who used sheisty methods to get the results they wanted and those who may have had conflicts of interest due to the relationship with the research-funding organizations (because if McDonald’s is funding the study on how bad it is for you, don’t you think the researchers might find that it’s actually not all that bad?). I read more books than I can count on how our brains work, how dopamine affects our motivations and other actions, and how our mind and body work together. Everything from psychology books to straight up hardcore biology, I read it. I learned about self care, mindfulness, skincare, body types, and dietary lifestyles and also tried some of them myself.
So long story short, my focus completed shifted from nutrition and exercise (which I thought was “wellness”) to, well, wellness in its true form. Now (many years, degrees, and certifications later), I know what wellness actually is. It’s an integration of physical, mental, and spiritual well-being, fueling the body, engaging the mind, and nurturing the spirit. Although it always includes striving for health via nutrition and exercise, it’s more about living life fully. It’s the integration of states of physical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, financial, environmental and occupational wellness. Each of these eight dimensions act and interact in a way that contributes to your quality of life, and disruption in any of these dimensions can lead to the imbalance of the whole being.
So, where am I now? I understand everything that I just shared with you, but I tend to want to do it all, all at the same time. This is what I call The “Super” Woman archetype. I’m either all in with the wellness, or I’m not “in” at all. The benefit of this is that I’m a go getter! I have no problem trying the challenging things and I’m no longer focused solely on nutrition and exercise. But the downside to that the burnout. The BURNOUT, y’all. Just as quickly as I get all pistons firing at 100%, 100% of the time, I’m back down to zero. So my current focus, now that I’m well versed on wellness, is to get comfortable with the fact that progress is not linear. Things will ebb and flow and I’m focused on progress, not perfection, and I think that’s the beauty of the wellness experience. Things will change as life changes and as humans, we naturally cannot do it all 100% of the time. I look forward to sharing more of my experience and journey with you as I help you to become your own wellness expert.
That’s it for this post! I hope this gets you one step closer to uncomplicating wellness and achieving your wellness goals without the guesswork. If you’re ready to start your wellness journey, get my free list guide 5 Things to Know When Starting Your Wellness Journey to uncomplicate wellness and bypass some common roadblocks.
I hope you found it useful and as always, thank you for journeying with me.