Ok I’m getting a little less ‘fru fru’ than I normally do on a Friday. That’s not to say I’m not as loved up and beaming happy as always – I just wanted to share something a little different with you all today.

Some of you may know what my path to wellness has entailed and how I’ve come to arrive where I am today, others of you may not. Basically (I’ll spare you the boring deets and cut to the juicy good bits) since about year 11/12 I have been quietly obsessed with health and fitness. BUT (and it’s a big but, although ironically my own butt was little at the time!) it was always purely from a weight loss perspective. Every single article I read, every single morsel of food I took in, every single bead of sweat during a workout was coming from a place inside me that told me that I wasn’t good enough. By doing all these things and following strict and restrictive exercise and eating behaviours, the nagging notion of ‘you’re not good enough’ was slowly changed to ‘you’re not good enough, yet’. That poignant ‘yet’ told me that by doing all this and pushing myself and sacrificing and concentrating on this end goal of ‘perfection’ that there was hope I could reach it. Berm berrrm. I crashed and burnt and to be honest my relationship with myself, with my body, with food and with my world had remained disordered (although physically healthy and ‘well’ looking on the outside) for years. Far longer than I’d care to share with my loved ones and those who care about me – just feelings and thoughts that I had become accustomed to dealing with on a daily basis.

This isn’t a shout out for sympathy or a chance to vent a sob story because truth is I don’t even think I’ve been at all hard done by. That’s the thing! For the past few years I’ve been so engulfed in such negative thought and action patterns that I never stopped to appreciate all the incredible things that I have been blessed with and should be grateful for, and as such I never based my decisions on positive emotions of love and respect. Ok I may have turned this post a bit ‘fru fru’ but bare with me…

I came across a quote by Kris Carr, who I referred to in a previous post as one of my most enlightening and positive teachers that I have come across, that practically jumped off the page and screamed at me.

“Wellness is not just about nutrition. It’s also about ecology, spirit, passion and culture”

This absolutely is true and really captures the difference in attitude that I’ve developed over the past year or so. I always told myself I wanted to be ‘fit’ or ‘healthy’ but in reality the desire I had was to be stick thin and look dynamite in size 8 jeans. Um, have you seen my bodacious, gloriously chunky legs? Ain’t gonna squeeze into those jeans anytime soon sugar, unless I remove a hell of a lot of bone and muscle.

I encourage all of you to look at your lives, take a step back and look at the choices you make in all sorts of areas: relationships, food, fitness, work, hobbies, values, EVERYTHING, and ask yourself if these choices have come from a place of love and respect or if they’ve been fuelled by guilt, fear or self-loathing. This awareness alone will make you have a think about whether you really are creating a ‘well’ environment for yourself or whether you’re pushing yourself uphill in the wrong direction.

I’m not at all suggesting that this way of looking at things is the ultimate way and I’m not saying that it’s better than the path you are on at the moment, but this simple way of looking at situations with a different tint of glasses has made a monumental difference in my life and to my health.

Blessings from my heart, that’s laying all the way down at my sleeve as I type this! x