Healthy change starts with you. Illness to Wellness? It is your choice! You can choose to struggle with your illness or invest in your wellness. We all surely know that it’s important to be healthy!
There is a massive contrast between health and illness.
Health is defined as
“the overall mental and physical state of a person; the absence of disease.”
Illness is defined as:
“a condition of being unhealthy in your body or mind; a specific condition that prevents your body or mind from working normally : a sickness or disease.”
You haven’t deliberately chosen to face illness it’s just happened, but I wonder if you really are doing everything you can to get your health back. Perhaps you feel it impossible while you feel so weak, energy less and tired all the time. I know my inner voice kept telling me, there was nothing I could do to improve how unwell I felt.
Your attitude at this point is crucial. You can’t resign yourself to staying ill and allowing it to detrimentally affect your life.
As I’ve already mentioned, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. Fed up of being unwell. Illness had taken over my life. Now I had to take the path to wellness. In my mind wellness would be the complete opposite to illness. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy but my alternative was far worse, stay ill and see my life go down. We must never lose sight of our target particularly when trying to move from illness to wellness. At times it’s going to be a struggle things will frustrate you push you to the edge of giving up. But you know ultimately you can get there and no longer suffer as badly as you may be right now.
It was time for my recovery. I took on personal responsibility to heal myself and enhance my well-being by making a commitment to live a “healthy lifestyle through taking care of my wellness.
I knew that from this point forward I had to make good choices and take 100% responsibility. I realized to this point I’d been making excuses, blaming my Doctors, shirked responsibility and just let things happen to me.
Life is not merely being alive, but being well. Marcus Aurelius
My final wake up call came in front of the doctor I was seeing for my back problem. Being born with a double curvature of the spine, my back had always been a problem waiting to happen, but had been kept in check by my love for weight training. I had through exercise built up my muscles to compensate for the weakness in my spine. My eye problem and vision loss put pay to this. Stopping my regular exercise routine allowed my spine to worsen and now it was a major problem. I couldn’t lie on my back without severe pain, take more than 5 steps before the shooting pains went through my body. Yet according to my Doctor there was nothing he could do. An operation would be to risky at my age, and being something I was born with and had controlled for so long he advised that all I could do was the same as I used to in order to repair the situation. All he could do was see me again in a year and check whether my spine had worsened.
Personally taking the path to wellness was my only alternative, and at last I realised I could no longer be dependent on doctors or drugs, and the self-pity I’d been practicing for too long was helping me not at all. Knowing my doctor couldn’t help me in any way could have seemed to me that all was lost, there being no physical cure but I knew there were things I could do.
Not liking how things were for me I had to try to change things, do things, and bring about improvement myself.
My starting point was to look at how good or bad my current lifestyle was, and to do this I used the ‘Wellness Assessment’ in a previous article. My score was below average, and like anyone who has below average score it was imperative I implemented changes to improve this. After completing my wellness assessment it was important to decide which area(s), were the ones needing me to make the initial changes.
If you have decided to move from illness to wellness I hope you’ve taken time for your own assessment to determine whether you are making destructive lifestyle choices, whether what you eat, how you use and exercise your body, how you relax and let go of stress, and how you safeguard yourself from the hazards around you are the best you can do to help yourself. It is important to recognize the impact of health-related decisions you’re making because your present actions and attitudes are shaping your life as it is at this moment.
Here’s the good news. Because you are responsible for making many decisions, you have much control over your personal state of wellness. You can engage in activities that will lead to the decline of your health. You can also follow practices that will help ensure good health. It is your choice.
Do you choose to establish healthy behaviours and actions so to move from illness to wellness?
Accept right now that your lifestyle choices will have a far greater impact on your health than any and all doctors who look after you. It’s about living a life full of personal responsibility and taking proactive steps.
Score Your Way To Good Health - With Our Healthy Lifestyle Plan
Score your way to good health with our healthy lifestyle plan and it's unique 70 point weekly scorecard!
