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Darla Fox

Professor Knott

Kinesiology 34

2 July 2020

Prescription for Healthy Living

For many years, fitness was a confusing concept for me. Growing up in a low-income

family of six, my parents did their best to feed us well-balanced meals, but when push came to

shove they raised us to eat whatever food we could afford in order to survive rather than focusing

on building very nutritious meals; food was also viewed as a reward, and certain treats were only

available on special occasions. This resulted in us learning and establishing unhealthy

relationships with food. As I have grown older, I have had to learn about fitness through physical

education courses and through my own independent studying. For a few years out of high school,

fitness was a big part of my life – I exercised consistently and ate mostly protein, healthy fats,

and vegetables; however, I strayed from these habits and began to fall back into old habits of

unhealthy eating and extra weight gain. These past three months I have been working to establish

more healthy habits. Regarding physical wellness, I exercise four to six times per week, am

conscious of my caloric intake and the nutritional value of my meals, and I avoid excessive

consumption of alcohol or other substances. As far as social and emotional well-being, I have

strong core relationships with friends and family, and I do fairly well at not letting my emotions

interfere with my goals and daily activities.

Of the six dimensions of wellness (physical, emotional, social, spiritual, environmental,

and intellectual), currently my main focus for improvement is on my physical and emotional

wellness. First of all, for physical wellness, I currently engage in four to six days of low-intensity
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cardio such as walking or dancing; however, I would like to increase my workout regimen to

include a balance of cardiovascular exercise, strength training and yoga. In addition to this

increase in physical activity, I also want to improve my eating habits. Although I currently eat

decently, I can definitely include more unprocessed foods like fruits and vegetables. As far as

emotional wellness, stress management is an area of opportunity for improvement, as it

occasionally prevents me from sleeping well. To combat this, I plan on incorporating meditation

into my daily routine in the mornings and the evenings. Lastly, I am going to establish a

consistent sleep routine. These various changes will improve all areas of my well-being.

Sustaining a healthy lifestyle is incredibly important for a person’s quality of life and for

their perception of their own quality of health. In 2013, a group of philosophers and

psychologists recruited a group of yoga practitioners to study, “an individual’s Yoga experience

as it relates to psychological wellness, physical wellness, and subjective well-being” (Lucia, iii).

They recruited male and female yoga practitioners from ages eighteen to twenty-five and various

demographic backgrounds, and the results showed that yoga practitioners received higher levels

of perceived mental wellness, physical wellness, and subjective wellness than non-yoga

participants (Lucia, 64). This illuminates that while some people may primarily categorize yoga

as a physical exercise style, yoga participants agree that the practice of yoga affects many

different aspects of their well-being; also because they perceive themselves as more healthy, they

are more likely to make health-conscious decisions and work to protect their health. Another area

of fitness that is often overlooked is stress management in the workforce. The medical field is an

especially stressful profession; in 2017, scientists conducted a study of meditation in a large

community teaching hospital to analyze meditation’s effect on reducing nurse burnout and stress

(Thimmapuram, 21). For twelve weeks, residents, faculty members, and nurses practiced
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“Heartfulness Meditation”, and the conclusion was that, “meditation offers an accessible and

efficient method by which physician and nurse burnout can be ameliorated and wellness can be

enhanced” (Thimmapuram, 21). Therefore, practicing meditation may help reduce stress in many

other professions. Both of these studies illustrate how working on certain areas of well-being

may also positively affect other dimensions of wellness.

My three goals for improving my health- related fitness include: establishing a healthier

relationship with food, increasing the consistency and variety in my workout regimen, and

reducing stress in my life. To establish a healthier relationship with food, I have been

consistently using a phone app called Noom that focuses on the psychological aspect of losing

weight and developing healthy habits for all areas of one’s life. In addition to using this app, I

plan to spend the next three months improving my diet: for the first month, I will reduce my

caloric intake, by month two I will include at least one meal a day that is high in vegetables and/

or fruit, and by month three I will make two to three meals a day built around vegetables or fruit.

I began this plan a month ago by working out three to five times a week with low intensity cardio

(walking or dancing); I have recently increased the regimen to include light strength training and

HIIT workouts, but by next month I will increase the exercise frequency to five to six days a

week with a combination of cardio, strength training, and yoga in order to improve my

cardiorespiratory endurance, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, and body

composition. The last goal is to engage in more stress-relieving activities such as establishing a

sleep routine and including daily meditation into my life. I currently struggle to sleep

consistently – to fix this, each week I will set my alarm for an hour earlier until I consistently

sleep and wake up at a more routine time. Also, I have found that meditating before sleeping is

helpful for inducing a sleepy state; I will implement nightly meditation to help fix this issue.
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Through all these changes, I hope to improve all aspects of my health-related fitness and the

various dimensions of wellness.

Currently, I am on the right path toward the healthy practices I would like to implement

in my lifestyle. By improving my relationship with food, increasing the consistency of my daily

exercise, and working to reduce stress in my life, I hope to get closer to achieving my overall

goal of wellness: to attain a balance of all the various dimensions of wellness and a holistic

approach to a healthy lifestyle.

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Works Cited

Lucia, Danielle. Yoga and Psychological Wellness, Physical Wellness, and Subjective Well-

being, Pacifica Graduate Institute, Ann Arbor, 2014. ProQuest,

https://libris.mtsac.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-

com.libris.mtsac.edu/docview/1525824357?accountid=12611.

Thimmapuram, Jayaram, et al. "Effect of Heartfulness Meditation on Burnout, Emotional

Wellness, and Telomere Length in Health Care Professionals." Journal of Community

Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives, vol. 7, no. 1, 2017, pp. 21-27. ProQuest,

https://libris.mtsac.edu/login?url=https://search-proquest-

com.libris.mtsac.edu/docview/2026382058?accountid=12611,

doi:http://dx.doi.org.libris.mtsac.edu/10.1080/20009666.2016.1270806.