August 17, 2016No Comments

Wellness….WHAT?! – #WellbeingWednesdays

Wellness wooden sign on a beautiful day

Many of us work through life trying to achieve 'wellness'. But what is wellness? Is it the juice detox everyone is doing? Is it being able to sit in a cross legged position and 'ohm' at the top of my lungs for hours on end? Is it being outside?

What does Wellness even mean?

Every time you read a piece of media, or a medical study there is more advice of what is good for you, what is bad for you, what you haven't realised you're even consuming or ingesting and we can get so confused with trying to do the best things for our bodies that often we just give up and go right back to what we were doing before.

It's hard working towards 'Wellness'. All you want is for someone to show you a big sign saying 'Wellness this way', but that's not how it works. What is good for me, might be bad for you and may be essential for someone else.

The way I deal with it is to try and work towards feeling better, being healthier but also not taking life too seriously. You can get so caught up with being healthy all the time that you end up resenting the lifestyle, and yourself trying to achieve the unachievable. We live in a world where plastics, pollutants and chemicals are part of every day life. Yes you could try and eradicate them from your life but you'd have to live in isolation to achieve it and where's the fun in that?

Take it one day at a time and one element of your life at a time. For me, my journey started with fitness. I found things that I loved to do and just focused on those. I do them regularly enough that they become a habit. Equally if I skip them for a week, I have a mildly guilty feeling but I know I'll get back to them next week so it's no big deal.

Then I moved onto food and this was my HARDEST part. I LOVE food. I LOVE eating food. I LOVE cooking and exploring food. Most importantly I LOVE big quantities of food. So to find out how to change a lot of that I had to figure out the best way to be healthy, still enjoy the food I eat with it's flavours and the quantity but eat foods that are better for me. Vegetables, fruits, grains, beans.

Next came skincare and home life. I've never really been a big skincare person as having psoriasis has always dictated what I use. But finding Tropic and it's range of natural products has changed all of that. And I'm now experimenting with the cleaning products we use at home and finding ways to change those slowly but surely.

The last thing is my way of life. Spending more time outside, in nature. Potentially trying to grow my own fruit and vegetables, although living in London that's not always possible. I have however started doing exactly that in my office in Central London. We have a small roof terrace where there are all kinds of goodies growing. Cabbage, rocket, lettuce, sunflowers and lots of herbs! All of my own doing which isn't too bad for a first try.

My point is you can work towards being healthier, being happier in small steps. Don't try and leave your life and go off and live on a remote island and you'll live until you're 200. Just do it in small ways, and do things that you enjoy and you'll be sure to get where you want to be.

Ciao for now x

July 5, 2016No Comments

Yoga is only for women – #TalkToMeTuesdays

Anyone who knows me knows I am particularly random. I like doing random activities and I like meeting and talking to random people. I don’t have a problem trying anything out, which is why some of my fitness passions come from activities traditionally linked to female activities, Zumba, Pilates and Yoga just to name a few.

It’s because of this attitude that I have got into yoga. It’s crazy how many times I ask men to come along with me to yoga and how many times they have excuses. Yoga isn’t for me is the most commonly used phrase, but I’ve also had lots of ‘yoga is for women’.

Now, it’s true that I like random things but yoga is not random. If you don’t really understand yoga and understand how good it can be for anyone, regardless of age, sex, conditions or a million other things then you really should educate yourself.

Rather than find yoga emasculating, I actually find yoga maculating. In order to perfect a yoga technique you have to have strength, balance, focus and determination. None of that is attributed to only one type of person. In order to hold a pose I need to focus on me. Yogi’s or just general yoga practitioner can be from every walk of life and the feeling I have after a good yoga session is euphoric at times.

I like all yoga, but I LOVE tough yoga. Tough yoga is yoga that makes me sweat (without the heat needing to be on!). It’s yoga that takes me much longer to hold a pose because I am trying to move my body into exactly the right pose while still being relaxed and still focusing on my breath. Tough yoga needs a strength, not just physically but mentally and that’s why I LOVE it.

So yea, I find it hard to have patience with men who say yoga is only for women. Maybe you should stop making excuses and get to a class? Let’s see if you can hack it 😛

Ciao for now x

  
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