Like most families, we’re always in search of health and wellness for ourselves and our children. Sometimes it feels like we’re searching for the holy grail though; we’re sure it’s wondrous, but we don’t really know what we’re looking for. So just what is wellness?
What is wellness
I really like this definition of wellness from Davis University in California, it really resonates with us:
Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices toward a healthy and fulfilling life.
This idea of ‘becoming aware’ makes a lot of sense. Wellness is more than just not being sick, it’s about being healthy. Holistically healthy too, so body, mind and spirit are all healthy and functioning. This also means we need to become aware of those parts of us that aren’t functioning well, so we can make better choices towards wellness.
See, our bodies are great at telling us when we’re sick. We get tired, our minds go foggy, our muscles get sore, we might have inflammation of the throat, or glands. Then our immune system kicks in and starts to fight off the illness.
But our bodies aren’t so good at telling us when we’re not well. You can actually live a fairly functioning existence, and yet still be really unwell; especially if you add mind and spirit into the mix.
And then this idea of a ‘fulfilling’ life. We really like that. I can understand that it would be hard to reach our potential if we’re not functioning at our absolute best. And as parents it’s our number one goal to do everything we can to help our kids reach their potential, right?
Nestlé Choose Wellness Quiz
Nestlé are running their Choose Wellness campaign all through September. It’s such a brilliant idea. More than 62,000 people have taken the wellness quiz already, which is a LOT of people making healthy choices!
They also have some great daily ideas on their #choosemywellness page, and you can enter their daily prize draw to win $1000 every day in September.
We really want to choose wellness, for our whole family’s sake. So we decided to take the quiz and go totally public with the results, in the hopes you might consider choosing wellness for your family too.
You can find Nestlé’s wellness quiz here on the Nestlé Choose Wellness website.
It’s really simple. It took both of us about 8 minutes to complete. There’s not too many questions, and it usually only asks you to think back over the last week. That was good for us, as we’re both REALLY sleep deprived!
Once you get your results the website gives you a whole heap of tips under each of the categories for things you can start to do to help you on your way towards wellness.
Our quiz results
Apparently 64 is the average result for New Zealander’s who’ve taken the quiz. I really was hoping for higher than that!
Here’s our results:
As you can see, we’ve got a fair bit of work to do in our family quest for wellness!
Wellness ideas brainstorm
We know we want to get better at this stuff. But at the same time, we also know we need to make sustainable changes.
It’s too easy to say, ‘right, we’ll eat our 5+ every day, and work out 5 times a week.’ But that’s just setting ourselves up to fail.
I’m not sure about your family, but for us, change needs to be incremental. We need to take baby steps, and make sure they’re really bedded in, and part of our everyday routine. Or, we just slip straight back into bad habits.
So, we did what we always do when we have a big idea to solve. We brainstormed. I know, that’s super-geeky right? But we really love brainstorming. Actually, it’s probably just a way of procrastinating, but it feels like we’re achieving something! We used Bubbl.us. We like it because it’s free for single use, and super intuitive. Here’s what we came up with:
We might need some more ideas yet. I’m not sure how much our wellness score will change with just these ones. We’ll see how we go over the next week and report back in Part 2 of our Search for Wellness.
In the meantime, we’d love to hear some of your ideas and maybe add them to the list. Take the Nestlé Choose Wellness quiz,and tell us your score, and what changes you want you and your family to make.
Or maybe you’ve got this wellness thing cracked. If so, do you have any ‘wellness’ hacks for the community we can all put into practice?
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