How do you become MegaWell?
Becoming MegaWell is about examining, making improvements and bringing into balance four fundamental disciplines:
Think Well
Thinking well starts with having a Vitality Mindset. This can be achieved by making sure you include things in your daily routine that put you in a positive frame of mind:
- Learning: Continuous learning is key to the vitality mindset. Making sure you are constantly looking for new things to try and pushing yourself outside of your comfort zone helps shift you from a fixed to a growth mindset
- Appreciation: Our natures often drive us to focus on what is wrong, but it is important to also take time to appreciate what is going well.
- Mindfulness: With mobile devices and social media, we are always faced with reminders of what has happened in the past or we get caught up in planning the next event. Giving yourself time to unplug and “be in the moment” can center us and bring our real priorities back into focus.
Eat Well
Too many people get caught up in extreme diets that may initially result in rapid weight gain, are impossible to maintain and the weight comes right back. The key to eating well is to learn to enjoy eating healthy, nutritious, delicious food. It is all about building sustainable habits that become a healthy lifestyle. Healthy eating should be enjoyable and easy. MegaWell will teach you how to get started and how to maintain a lifestyle of eating well:
- Foundation: The basics of good nutrition and making healthy food choices
- Practice: how to shop for and prepare healthy foods quickly and easily at home
- Transformation: How to get off the diet rollercoaster. At MegaWell, we use the science of behavior change and principles of intuitive eating to help you build positive relationships with food and your body
Move Well
Physical fitness is one of the most important ways to stay healthy. But people often work out in ways that do not actually improve their health and in some cases can lead to injuries or chronic problems. And physical wellbeing doesn’t require a huge time commitment. It is all about quality and consistency not quantity. When designing a fitness routine it is import to focus on four key principles of moving well:
- Movement: Too many of us lead largely sedentary lives and need to incorporate regular movement. That can be as simple as going for a walk or can involve more strenuous activities like running or biking. If you have joint pain, there are many lower impact alternatives like yoga and swimming. The important thing is to get your body moving on a regular basis and to raise your heart rate to promote cardiovascular health.
- Strength: As we age, we lose muscle mass and bone density. This can make us more vulnerable to injury, but it also leads to weight gain. Large muscles consume lots of energy even when resting. So when you lose muscle, you tend to convert more of what you eat into unwanted fat. Incorporating strength training into your regular activities can be easy and low impact and can be done in very little time.
- Balance: Our bodies are incredibly complex machines. Every simple movement engages many stabilizing muscles, ligaments, tendons, nerves, bones and areas of our brains. Incorporating balance exercises into our regular routine helps to keep all these systems engaged and healthy.
- Flexibility: There is nothing like an injury to stop us from moving regularly and send us into a tailspin of getting out of shape and being less happy. One of the best ways to prevent injuries is to promote flexibility and mobility
Connect Well
Human beings are social beings that thrive on connections with each other as well as with the world around them. When we let ourselves get isolated, it impacts our mental and physical health. And yet, in this age of digital content and mobile devices, it is easy to let ourselves become separated from the people and places that give us energy. To correct this imbalance, we can focus on re-activating four areas of connection:
- People: Who are the people that bring you joy or who challenge you to grow? Family and friends are a great place to start. But you can also explore ways to get more involved in your community which will help you forge new relationships. Staying connected to the people in your lives or continuously expanding your circle is a great way to improve your outlook and keep you grounded.
- Purpose: Human history shows us that we are wired to try to achieve something. Whether that is doing something that is meaningful to us, striving to overcome a challenge, volunteering for a non-profit, studies have shown that doing meaningful work brings us peace of mind, improves mental acuity and can even extend our lives.
- Passion: It is not enough to just go through the motions. While people do thrive on accomplishments, most of us do even better when we are working on things we care about. What really matters to you? Can you find ways to incorporate that into your work or your hobbies? Make sure you spend time doing things you love.
- Places: It is easy to get stuck in a rut and when we do that, we can find that the “spark of life” can begin to fade. People need new experiences and one of the best ways to do that is to constantly plan new adventures. That can be close to home, like getting outside and taking a walk. Getting out into nature has been proven to have a positive impact on your state of mind. Or you can do something more dramatic like going to visit a new country where you can experience a different culture.