The Wellness Wheel

Is Your Current Lifestyle Making You Ill?

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The Wellness Wheel

If you’ve been reading this series of articles you by now should have completed the Wellness Assessment and have an idea of the areas you are out of alignment in e.g. those that are not doing you any good. I want now for you to really get some certainty over the areas that you need to most work on.

I want you to figure out how content you are today specifically in the main areas that contribute to your wellness. The Wellness Wheel is a tool that will enable you to clearly determine which areas of your life are out of balance and then enable you to create goals which if you take action on, will result in bringing about major improvements in your health.

To get a snapshot of your wellness, look at your scores from each area of the wellness assessment and calculate a percentage score of satisfaction for each area. If you believe you are perfect in an area then give yourself 100%, if your satisfaction is non-existent and you are doing as bad as could possibly be score yourself 0%.

Before you score yourself brainstorm a bit more. So you evaluate your current status for each area most accurately and honestly really ask yourself how you feel about each area. Notice when you feel room for improvements and think about how things could be even better. Review each of the areas from the point of view of where you’d like to be. What would your ideal life look like in each of these areas? Describe the vision. Dare to dream. Make sure to include the impossible.

Score yourself for each area:

wellness-table

With all the measures across each of the important areas in your life, you have a complete Personal Wellness Scorecard.

Now imagine taking those scores and drawing a line in the respective area on a Wellness Wheel. Look at your completed wheel. If your life is riding on this wheel, how bumpy is the ride?

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Without a doubt you will have discovered areas that are worst and you are starting to realise that you need to begin making changes.

Many of us think about changes we’d like to make in our lives. When it comes to health recommendations, we mostly know the rules: Exercise every day of the week; eat a varied and nutritious diet; keep your body weight down; get enough sleep; use relaxation methods, don’t smoke and limit alcohol, yet we may start to make changes but rarely stick with them.

Making healthy lifestyle changes affects not only our risk for disease and the way we feel today but also our health and ability to function independently in later life. Yet making lifestyle changes is hard. Even when we’re strongly motivated, adopting a new, healthy habit — or breaking an old, bad one — can be terribly difficult.

If you want to make truly lasting health changes, they have to be a complete lifestyle change. A Wellness Lifestyle isn’t about a temporary diet to lose weight but a total lifestyle change focused on nourishing and strengthening your body from the inside out.

If you are truly committed to no longer living a life focused around your ill health then making these changes, establishing a healthy lifestyle by committing to improve all wellness areas is of paramount importance to you.

Remember Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the World and one of the biggest contributors to this is a lack of commitment to a healthy lifestyle. Your lifestyle is not only your best defence against heart disease and stroke, and most other illnesses, it’s also your responsibility.

The rewards for making these changes are endless, and if you’re ready to make a lifestyle change then you’re ready to get started.

Once you’re ready to make a change, the key is to make a plan that will prepare you for success. Careful planning means setting small goals and taking things one step at a time. We will look at planning for your new Wellness Lifestyle in the next article in this series.

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About the author: Larry Lewis
My name is Larry Lewis, Health & Wellness Life Coach, Founder of Healthy Lifestyles Living, contributor to the Huffington Post, recently featured in the Sunday Mail Newspaper and somebody who went from being an owner of a chain of gyms and fitness fanatic, to a visually impaired overweight and incredibly sick person. Read about my illness to wellness story.

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