Hello y ‘all, thanks to all of you that wrote about what health means to you. It made for great reading 😀

And guess what, y’all were right. Health is all that and more!

A couple of years back, medics focused on looking at health in a negative way. And so, someone was considered healthy if they weren’t ill/sick. But that’s not all true, right? One could run a complete medical check and nothing is found wrong, but this person is in a really toxic relationship which breaks his/her heart over and over again. That person is not really healthy and it shows. Same goes for someone who works in an environment that has a whole lot drama: people scheming to move ahead and throwing people under the bus in order to achieve that. What about the guy whose opinion counts for nothing…he’s never asked to give an opinion and when he ventures to speak, he’s shut down. Or the lady who smiles at everyone, but deep down inside is so angry with the world for all manner of missed opportunities…the education she never pursued, because she got married, the job she could never aspire for because her husband assured her she wasn’t good enough, the business she could never keep going because the children made amazing demands on her time etc.

Some of you defined, health as a ‘state of physical, mental and social well being and not just the absence of disease’, taking the words right out of the World Health Organization’s mouth 😀 This essentially means that health involves all areas of our lives: physical (the type that can show up on the lab work), social (our feeling of inclusion in any group eg family, workplace etc), emotional (knowing that we love and are loved in return), mental (feeling that we have something to contribute and that our opinions count), occupational (how we react to the pace of work in our work places or how the work environment is structured), environmental (things in our surroundings that can potentially harm us eg malaria-causing mosquitoes breeding in a dirty environment with stopped-up drainage gutters) or even spiritual ( our sense of being at peace with the world). So, if you’re not healthy in any aspect of these, you’re really not healthy as we can’t compartmentalise our lives…no matter how much we try 😀

So, the new focus is encouraging the good stuff: health promotion. And really that’s what the whole concept of wellness addresses. It focuses on providing the tool kit that keeps you in that state of wellness which is what this page, our blog and our show were set up to do. I hope we have contributed to your sense of wellness in the last one year through our tips on eating, hygiene, exercise, disease risk factors and indeed all aspects of health 😀

Let’s keep at it people 😀  There’s a whole lot more where all that came from. 

Here’s to wellness…Make sure you’re sipping from a glass of water 😀