I love using the words intentional wellness; it’s such a strong word… intentional.
Intentional wellness means just thinking about it isn’t enough.
Intentional wellness means just trying isn’t enough.
A colleague recently told me, if a client tells her they will “try” to change their eating habits, she tells them that is the same as your spouse saying, “I will try to be faithful.” (cue record screeching) Whoa, what?! That won’t work!
Trying isn’t enough but being intentional is.
What is intentional wellness?
Chances are, you made it to my website because you don’t feel great.
You might feel really tired all the time, have anxiety, pain all over, and you just don’t feel good. You know something needs to change, you’re ready for change, you just don’t know what or how to change.
I’m glad you made it here because I know where you need to start.
Most people have a goal of getting healthy. Maybe you have that same goal. You may not have a solid definition of what that means, all you know is you want to feel better. In order to gain health, you have to practice wellness.
Wellness is the act of practicing healthy habits on a daily basis to thrive not just survive physically and mentally.
What’s Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity?
Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.
If your lifestyle habits are the same now as they were before you started feeling rundown, anxious, pain or any other symptom that makes you want to feel better, then don’t expect any different results. Your body can’t heal in the same environment in which it became ill.
Taking responsibility for your lifestyle is a choice. You can become response-able in how you choose to live your life. Every choice will bring you closer or farther from how you ultimately want to feel. Once you recognize you have the power to control your health, choices become more clear and easier to make.
Making the choices that bring you closer to health isn’t easy. It’s way easier to stick with the norm and what’s comfortable. Change takes you out of your comfort zone where you’re not sure if you’re doing the right thing and you feel alone because no one else (you know) is making the same choices.
But it’s time. It’s time to make those hard choices. It’s time to get out of your comfort zone. It’s time to choose you…on purpose.
Being intentional means doing something on purpose and with a meaning behind it. When you choose to follow intentional wellness, you are choosing to practice healthy habits daily. You are choosing those habits on purpose and with a meaning.
How does intentional wellness differ from traditional wellness practices?
The traditional wellness model looks something like this: you have a problem, let’s say you are always rundown and feel tired all the time. You know something isn’t right so you go to the doctor. He runs lab tests on you but at your follow up he tells you everything looks good and you’re healthy. You know what you’re feeling isn’t health but you don’t know what else to do so you trust your doctor. As time goes on, nothing gets better, in fact you’ve gotten worse and now, on top of having a difficult time getting out of bed, you hurt all over.
You go back to your doctor to run more tests. He still doesn’t find anything so he sends you to a specialist. The specialist runs even more tests and finally comes up with a diagnosis. You feel relieved because now you know it’s not just in your head and you can start feeling better. But all the specialist has for you is a prescription, in which you take, but it doesn’t make things much better and now you feel trapped because you don’t see an end in sight.
Congratulations, you’ve just become a customer for life.
Let me ask you this.
When you choose traditional wellness practices, are you putting any thought, purpose or meaning behind making your own wellness choices? Or are you putting all your trust in the doctor and the traditional medical profession?
When you choose the traditional wellness route, you may have chosen it intentionally, but there isn’t anything intentional about it because it’s the easy button. You are allowing the doctor to make all your wellness choices for you and you no longer become involved in your wellness.
It’s like when you’re traveling with your husband and he does all the navigating. You just sit back and relax and have no idea how you got there, and couldn’t get there again if you had to (without your phone of course).
Intentional wellness is completely opposite. You remain in control of all your wellness choices. You do all the navigating by putting in the hard work, saying no when you have to, and doing the things you don’t really want to do because they’re hard but doing them anyway.
But those hard choices are choices you’ve made intentionally, on purpose and with a meaning.
What are some examples of intentional wellness practices?
At the end of last year, I knew something had to change.
I was having a few health issues that weren’t serious, I just knew they could become serious if I let them continue. I felt like part of what needed to change was my schedule. During my typical day, I would sleep as absolutely late as I could, get my kids up, feed them, make lunches and get them to school. I would come home and either sit and read until I started seeing clients, or I would exercise. Most of the time I would choose to read because it was warm and comfy. I would sit under a blanket with my tea and I LOVED IT! I would read right up until I had to get ready to see clients. Once finished seeing clients and working, it was time for pick up, after school activities, supper, bathtime and bedtime routines. I would then find myself laying in bed, tossing and turning because I wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep when I needed to to get a full night’s rest.
Something had to shift. I knew the reading had to change. The reading itself wasn’t bad. Most of the time I was reading my Bible or a bible study so it was good for me. But I was choosing to sit and read over moving my body like I should have been doing.
So I made that change. I started making my tea while getting the kids ready and I drank it on the way to school. I then came home and exercised before seeing clients.
That worked great for a little while but then I found myself not reading my Bible and falling behind on whatever bible study my group was doing. My health issues weren’t changing much so I knew I hadn’t gotten the changes completely right.
At the beginning of this year, I felt a pull to wake up early to spend time with God and read my Bible. Let me tell you, that wasn’t something I wanted to do. I love my sleep and I really don’t like to get up early. But I intentionally chose to get up at 5:45 am each morning and read my Bible before my day starts.
Low and behold, I started sleeping better, and my health issues started resolving. All because I made some intentional wellness choices. They weren’t big, dramatic changes, and no one even knew I was making the changes, but they made a big difference in my life.
Examples of intentional wellness practices can be as simple as changing what time you wake up. They can also be as complex as completely overhauling your diet. Intentional wellness practices are anything you do on purpose and with a meaning that leads to better health.
In my practice, I like to encourage clients to make one shift at a time. Because I’m a dietitian at heart, I recommend to most of my clients to change their diet first. Changing your diet has to be intentional. If you are half heartedly trying and just winging it, you won’t make progress toward achieving health. It takes making decisions on purpose and with a meaning behind them to establish a routine and create habits. If the habits aren’t created, you will just go back to pushing the easy button. The easy button with your diet is getting takeout or eating boxed meals, pushing you further away from health.
How does intentional wellness improve my overall health and well-being?
I wouldn’t call myself a control freak. I do like order and I do like when things go smoothly, but I don’t mind if they don’t go according to plan. What I don’t like is being out of control. It’s when I have no control, I don’t like where the path is headed, and I feel like I don’t know how to stop it.
That is what I felt like when I battled anxiety, digestive problems and insomnia. I went to the doctor but I was just at the mercy of the doctor’s knowledge (which was only limited to trying different antibiotics and medications). My overall health wasn’t improving and I wasn’t in a state of being happy or well.
I spent time each day, intentionally researching what needed to change to heal my body and not feel trapped by medicine. I intentionally developed a plan. And I intentionally implemented that plan each day. It took time, effort and dedication to make the changes and create the habits. And it took intentionally choosing the wellness choices each time I wanted to push the easy button.
My overall health and well-being improved and I no longer needed medication. I didn’t feel trapped anymore. And I felt in control of my health and decisions.
My story isn’t unique.
People make intentional wellness choices everyday that improve their overall health and well-being. It feels good to have a sense of control in your own health.
Can intentional wellness be used to address specific health concerns?
I have seen clients use intentional wellness practices to heal from lots of diagnosed and undiagnosed health concerns. Some women contact me after being diagnosed with an autoimmune disease or a chronic disease. Some women contact me before being diagnosed with anything but they know they are headed toward being diagnosed with something they don’t want to be labeled with.
In making the decision to use intentional wellness practices, you are making the decision to find the root cause to your health problem/problems. Most women don’t land on this decision lightly. At first it sounds great, but then with more research into it, you realize it takes hard work and being intentional about your decisions.
Most women finally choose intentional wellness practices when the alternative is harder, so then intentional wellness becomes the easy button. No matter how hard it is, it’s much easier to do what you know is right than to fight to make something work you know isn’t right.
If something isn’t right, there is a root cause. If there is a root cause, intentional wellness practices can be used to address it. So, intentional wellness practices can be used to help any and every health concern.
What role does nutrition play in intentional wellness?
Intentionally changing your diet will be the foundation for anyone seeking health. Eating nutritious foods in and of itself is a wellness practice. But eating nutritious foods isn’t easy, so it takes intention to make the hard decisions for each meal.
The easy button with your diet is the Standard American Diet (S.A.D.). When life gets hard, busy, or complicated, it’s easy to eat the S.A.D. because it’s easy to get takeout. When you get upset or down, it’s easy to eat the S.A.D. because it’s easy to grab comfort food to make you feel better (temporarily). And when you’re on a trip, it’s easy to eat the S.A.D. because, YOLO, right?
Let’s say you worked all day and your child/children have games or multiple activities in the evenings, making it hard to cook. What do you do for supper? Run through the drive-thru and supper is on the table in no time. That’s so easy. You don’t have to think about it and you don’t have to take the time to prepare the meal. You can then enjoy your kids’ activities without the added stress of making supper.
The only problem is, what you eat is the building block for your health. Since you have a health problem you are trying to find the answer to (I assume you do, or you wouldn’t be reading this), takeout is only going to make it worse. The food you eat is information to your body. The information is telling your cells to create health or create inflammation and chaos. The information will bring you closer to health or farther from it.
When life gets busy or sad or YOLO, it takes intentional nutrition choices to bring you closer to health.
How does intentional wellness help improve my mental and emotional health?
We’ve all been at the point when your life seems to be super busy and you feel like you’re just barely keeping up. Maybe you’re juggling ten things at a time with work, on top of raising a family, being a wife, and running a household. You feel like you’re doing all the things but not well because you can only put about 50% effort into each thing. You’re spread too thin.
Then your mind starts going. You start asking and telling yourself things like: why can’t I do this well? Why don’t I just say no? I’m not good enough. Why did they even hire me? What if they realize I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m a failure to my kids. What if my kids see me as a failure? I’m such a mess.
Yada yada yada…
You have a minute break so you zone out on social media and start comparing the mess of your life with everyone else’s seemingly perfect life and you feel even worse about yourself.
It’s so easy to let the “not enoughs” and the “what ifs” take over. We are wired to want to do well and when we don’t meet our own expectations, we talk badly about ourselves. Behind it all is fear and pride. But the problem is, every cell in your body hears and feels your thoughts.
You soon start to have mood swings, irritability, heart racing, nervous stomach feeling, aches and pains. If you go to the traditional medical doctor, you’ll most likely be diagnosed with anxiety and prescribed medication. Again, you have then become a customer for life because you have not been given any information on lifestyle changes. Your doctor may have told you to reduce your stress, but that’s not helpful.
When you work with a practitioner that looks for the root cause to your symptoms, your mental and emotional health become a priority. Using intentional wellness practices, you will remain in control of your own health by learning mindfulness to prevent the symptoms.
What role does mindfulness play in intentional wellness?
Because every cell in your body hears and feels your thoughts, your mind plays a crucial role in how you feel from day to day and your overall health.
The definition of mindfulness is the state of being conscious or aware of something. We tend to not pay attention to much that goes on in our bodies. We go about our day and kind of check out because our body is going to run on autopilot anyway, right? But is that really being in control of your own health? Are you actively playing a part in your health by checking in with your own needs and honoring those needs?
I think when we check out, it’s pushing the easy button. We live in a fast paced, go, go, go society where we are told we aren’t successful if we aren’t productive. Being mindful doesn’t look like being productive (although it is very productive). To some, being mindful may look lazy because you may have to sit still and listen.
Your body will tell you what it needs.
Most people don’t know how to listen to what their body is telling them. You too have probably been taught from a young age not to listen to your body’s needs and to just push through. The problem is, when your body has a need, it seriously has a need. It will keep asking you gently to fulfill it but if you don’t, it will yell, creating a symptom. And if you still don’t listen, it will scream, with a disease. That is because at that point, your body is in dis-ease.
Becoming mindful of your body’s needs is an intentional wellness practice. You will be taught how to listen to your body intentionally creating trust and ease within yourself.
How can I incorporate intentional wellness into my daily life?
You just start.
You pick what you feel is the best place to start for you and what will make the most impact, and you start…intentionally. You will have to adjust your life and schedule according to what makes sense for you and you make changes as you go.
We live in a generation that has knowledge of health and wellness at our fingertips. Sometimes, though, the amount of information we can research and find can be overwhelming. With the amount of intentional wellness practices available and the amount of changes you can and probably should make, incorporating them into your daily life may also feel overwhelming. Where do you begin when there’s too much information? That’s the point when most people usually give up.
It would be helpful to write down a list of intentional wellness practices you would like to incorporate. Start by picking one at a time to incorporate. You may want to start with the intentional wellness practice that you feel will make the most impact. Or you may want to start with the intentional wellness practice that you feel will be the easiest or even hardest to incorporate. Whatever you decide, do it with intention behind it.
In my practice, I help women decide what will make the most impact, when to start incorporating changes and how to incorporate changes. I love incorporating intentional nutrition changes first for most women because it can really make a huge impact quickly. But for some, I start at a different point because I feel like nutrition changes won’t make as big of an impact for her.
How can I track my progress and success with intentional wellness practices?
Most of the time the trick isn’t incorporating the intentional wellness practices, it’s maintaining the changes. That’s why it works to shift your focus of progress on the right thing, and off the wrong thing (that darn scale will get you every time). The number on the scale is just one piece of the puzzle. In fact, it’s not even a very important piece, especially if it is hard emotionally to see that number. So many factors are dependent upon weight. If your emotions and feelings toward yourself change after seeing the number on the scale, your focus needs to change and you need to get rid of your scale.
To shift your focus, you need another tool to track your progress.
After you write down the intentional wellness practices you want to try as I suggested above, write down a list of your symptoms. You can then rate them on a scale or write beside them how often and how severe they are. Choose a specified time like once a month to go through that list to rate them again.
I have women complete a symptom survey each time she meets with me. It is a long list of possible symptoms. She has to tell me how severely she suffers from them by giving me a number on the survey scale. I love using it as a tool because it shifts her focus away from her weight and onto how she feels. When your focus is on how dramatically improved you feel making intentional wellness changes, it’s easier to stick to.
Are there any potential risks or drawbacks to practicing intentional wellness?
As with any life change, there will be a ripple effect on the rest of your life. Making intentional wellness changes is not meant to keep your life the same though. You can not get well in the same environment you got sick. So intentional wellness practices are meant to encourage change in all areas of your life.
One of the most significant drawbacks would be the potential for you to feel left out. In our society, social events are centered around food. To feed crowds, the food is usually S.A.D. food and cheap quality. Following intentional wellness practices, you would intentionally not eat that food. Although there are many ways around the feelings of being left out, that is a potential drawback.
Another potential drawback is possibly being called a “hippie” or “granola” by your friends. But are they really your friends if they don’t want the best for you and just want to make fun of you? Find your people that won’t say those things. Better yet, find friends that are practicing the same intentional wellness practices so you can find health together.
How can I create an intentional wellness plan for myself?
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Creating a plan takes research, time and intentionality.
Start by doing your research on what intentional wellness practices are available. Make a list of what practices you want to incorporate. Pick one you want to start with. Pick a date to start. Then start. Starting for some people is the hardest part.
For others, it’s the maintenance. You have to plan that ahead too. Think about any events or travel you have coming up that you need to think through. If you plan to intentionally change your diet first, plan out your meals and snacks for the event or trip.
I recently ran a hormone test on myself. It was a month-long test and revolved around my cycle. I traveled to the beach during that month and had to plan how I would continue to test, what I needed to bring, and how I would store it.
Intentional wellness practices are possible for everyone to follow, it just takes intentionality. And if I can do it, so can you. Trust me… I am not a planner by nature and it takes intentionality for me!
How can I find a qualified practitioner who specializes in intentional wellness?
If you are interested in finding a practitioner who specializes in intentional wellness (and don’t want to use me of course), there are several ways to find a qualified practitioner. And if you don’t find one in your area, remember many practitioners practice remotely now so don’t give up. If you do find someone remotely, make sure you will get good quality time with that practitioner and you won’t just be following a program they developed without any one-on-one time (unless you know that going into it and that’s what you’re looking for).
- You can search for the terms Integrative practitioner/dietitian/doctor, functional practitioner/dietitian/doctor, holistic practitioner/dietitian/doctor, or root cause practitioner/dietitian/doctor in your area to see if you have any local practitioners. Searching for a dietitian will ensure you have a strong focus on nutrition and will receive more guidance in this area. Many practitioners will just give a handout and not give individualized guidance on nutrition so make sure you know what you get in advance.
- The Institute for Functional Medicine and the Integrative and Functional Nutrition Academy both have a practitioner search database. Practitioners who have completed the certification process and have requested their information be shared get listed in the database. Not all practitioners who have completed the training, though, will be listed because usually there is a certification route and a non-certification route. The only difference is a test at the end of the training.
- You can join Facebook groups centered around certain disease topics to ask questions from others that have found healing with the advice from natural medicine practitioners.
Intentional wellness is a powerful approach to improving your health and well-being.
It involves making deliberate, purposeful choices to create and maintain healthy habits in your daily life. By taking responsibility for your lifestyle and actively participating in your own wellness journey, you can achieve better physical and mental health.
Intentional wellness is not about making dramatic, immediate changes; it’s about making intentional, meaningful choices that lead to lasting improvements. Whether it’s adjusting your diet, incorporating mindfulness, or addressing specific health concerns, intentional wellness can be tailored to your unique needs and goals.
If you’re ready to embark on this transformative journey towards improved health, consider reaching out to a functional nutritionist who understands the principles of intentional wellness (hi, that’s me!) and can guide you on your path to a healthier, more vibrant life.
It’s time to choose wellness intentionally and make those hard but empowering choices that lead you to the health and vitality you deserve.
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