What Health Means to Me: Healthy Heddleston

Editor’s Note: this post is part of the current series of posts submitted by healthy living bloggers on what health means to them. We are no longer taking submissions on this topic and have opened the floor to a new topic.

This post is brought to you by Katie who blogs at Healthy Heddleston.

What does healthy mean to me? The nuts and bolts to my answer is quite simple: education, healthy eating, regular exercise, and good emotional health. Digging a bit deeper, those four points may mean something completely different amongst different people. However, the reasons stated below are specifically related to me/what works for me/what I believe.

Education
Personally, I am a Registered Dietitian and knew I wanted to become one since I was in high school. While this is not a goal for everyone, learning to educate yourself properly in regards to nutrition is very important. Going vegetarian or vegan? What will your protein sources be?Choosing to eat raw? Who’s recipes will you follow, are you creating your own, and do you need a food dehydrator? Want to only eat local foods? Do you have the proper access to farmer’s markets, farm, etc? Catch my drift?

Part of education in regards to my meaning for health, goes beyond just educating myself. As an RD, I embrace educating others about proper food choices, learning what food choices work best for them, and integrating the whole family into making the food decisions. I embrace these points in my own home as well. I can’t wait to bring children into this world with my husband and educate them with the knowledge for them to one day make good food choices to last a lifetime.

Healthy Eating
A huge part of my healthy eating includes maintaining a gluten free diet; I’ve been gluten intolerant (officially) since March 2009 — but mostly likely for much longer. I need to maintain a gluten free diet or my celia aren’t too happy with me! Additionally, ensuring I consume enough fruits and veggies a day is crucial. Not only is this also good for my gastrointestinal health, but fruits and veggies make me feel healthy and good about myself for making a wise food choice. I also love creating and experimenting with new recipes and just letting my creativity flow in the kitchen!

Regular Exercise
Recently, my regular exercise has been all about becoming a runner. I recently ran my first 5K too! I also just moved to a new apartment complex which has a pool and a workout room. This definitely helps to keep my exercise in check! I wasn’t always into solo workouts — I actually enjoy team sports much better! I grew up always involved: volleyball, basketball, dance team, tennis, and more! Team sports helped me learn to surround myself with positive people who like to exercise as well. Now, my husband and I enjoy playing basketball, tennis, running around our new complex, biking in the metropark, and hiking on trails. It is great to be a team!

Emotional Health

None of the above points matter unless you have good emotional health. How you handle yourself in certain food or exercise situations is crucial. What if you go off your healthy eating plan and indulge? Good emotional healthy would not be to beat yourself up about it! Same goes for regularly exercising… Miss a workout? Not able to push as hard as you wanted? There is always tomorrow! Forgiveness is so important in maintaining emotional health.

Emotional health also means recognizing if you are becoming too obsessive or not working hard enough when it comes to healthy eating and exercising regularly. Understanding yourself and how you are going to deal with yourself is so important. I used to get hung up on the number of the scale, calories burned at the gum, and calories eaten per day. Now, I’m focused on maintenance of weight with gradual weight loss. I also use my clothes as an indicated of how well I’m working at the gym. Furthermore, filling my body with nutritious foods and forgiving myself when I can’t do any of what I just said right are my number one priorities. To read more about my story, click here.

While all of these are very very important — which do you think holds the most weight? Education, Healthy Eating, Regular Exercise, or Emotional Health?

Thanks, Katie! To stay updated on everything going on with HLB, please be sure to subscribe in your feed of choice!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/HealthyLivingBlogs