At Home Health: What It Means to Be Healthy?
Recently, the Fashion Zone had the opportunity to work with Christine Song (external link, opens in new window) , a health and life coach, to present a workshop on at home health. It can be hard to take care of yourself, especially given the current conditions, so coach Chris shared ways to self-care with food, exercise and mental health.
Coach Chris provided wonderful advice on how to take care of ourselves. It’s always important to check in with yourself to ensure you can stay healthy and happy at home.
You can find Chris at @sophryn_ (external link) on Instagram, her website sophryn.ca (external link) or email her at heycoach@sophryn.ca.
Key Takeaway #1: Honour Your Hunger, Respect Your Fullness
When spending so much time at home, your eating habits can change and that’s okay. Coach Chris shared that you should honour your hunger and respect your fullness. This means to eat intuitively, so eat when you’re hungry. A tip to do this is to think of hunger as a scale from 1 to 10. Plan your meal or snack when you’re at a 2, so you can take time to think about what kind of food you want to eat and in what portion. That way, by the time you eat, you’re at a level 4 hunger level. This is a great time to feel yourself feeling satisfied and truly enjoy what you’re eating.
Key Takeaway #2: All Movement Counts
Coach Christine highlighted that movement is essential to any lifestyle, however, all movement counts. This means that anything from walking around the block to an intense workout counts as movement. You just need to find a type of movement that works for you. Movement should be fun and enjoyable. When movement is enjoyed and not forced, it’s more likely that you’ll follow through with it.
Key Takeaway #3: Grow Through What You Go Through
On the topic of mental health, she taught us about emotional fitness which is taking action on the emotions we feel rather than avoiding them. In order to do this, she walked us through the “ABLED” exercise. This stands for awareness, be in it, listen and learn from it, experience it, and do something about it.
First we each thought of an emotion we were feeling, making us aware of it. From there, we practised “being in it” by placing our hands in the areas we felt the emotion such as our heart, or shoulders. To listen and learn from it and experience it, we thought about how it was impacting us in our lives. Finally, we thought of ways to do something about it. This step is very important since it leaves us with a way to face our emotion. For example, if you’re feeling stressed, you can put an hour aside in your day to deal with what is making you stressed.