The belief that healing is a one way street can be a hard one to shake: we live in a society that believes the right solutions are the ones that take the least amount of time and are proven to work for all. For a patient seeking wellness, this kind of thinking can create guilt, close-mindedness, shame, and in some cases, financial loss. For, when it comes to wellness, it’s patience, adaptability, and personal preference that are the building blocks to a successful journey.
Today, we have access to so much information thanks to all the different media. Websites, blogs, podcasts, books, and articles serve as an entire atlas from which we can plan our journey toward optimal health. In this sense, there is no such thing as a mistake or wrong route: only u-turns and sharp rights; and the patient can get to know his or her body and mind better along the way. Yet, due to the societal pressures regarding a health journey, many receive the influx of information as an overwhelming pile of contradicting notions that they’re meant to sort through as if it in it were hidden the golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s Health Factory.
Fortunately for us, there is no golden ticket to health. Health is personal: there comes a point where blood results and x-rays no longer measure what we know our body is meant look like, feel like, and be capable of. If we begin believing in uniformity regarding something as complex as the human body, we are just as ignorant as the idling heckler whom marathon runner Latoya Shauntay Snell recalls crying out from the sidelines, “it’s going to take your fat ass forever.” And if we begin to believe there is one correct approach to wellness, we are just as arrogant as youtubers Freelee the Banana girl and Abbey Sharp, whose careers revolve around praising or shaming people’s diets.
There’s not been enough revoking of the outdated “take a pill and you’ll feel better” or “one size fits all” mentality towards wellness. Many are seeking wellness, but they are seeking it with rigidity. Up until recently, having food allergies at a dinner was received as being a “picky eater” in certain European countries, because the widely considered the healthiest way to eat was eating a little bit of everything. Online, we still see the close mindedness regarding diet choice. “I don’t want to get murdered by people” jokes Cartia Mallan explaining her reluctance to admit she’s no longer vegan, “this is why I don’t talk about my diet much— and even when I was plant based, I didn’t like to speak about it too much.”
“The popular logic behind an elimination diet is to remove the foods that most commonly tend to trigger an inflammatory response in the body” explains holistic health coach and nutritionist Lori Tsey, but “diet is case-specific, so [discovering] the best diet plan for an individual has to do with a wide variety of factors, including environment, season, genetics, stress level, age, and beyond.” Indeed, Keto, Vegan, Paleo, and more all seek to do the same thing: reduce inflammation; granted, in very different ways. But that difference is blessings: if one approach doesn’t work for you, the other just might. And if none do, that’s just fine too. “A fantastic approach to improving the Standard American Diet” Tsey reminds us, “is to crowd out, or replace, the highly processed and refined foods with minimally processed, whole, plant-based, and organic foods when possible.”
The remains of a healthcare system proven to be too structured and simplistic in its values is tarnishing the efforts of open minded individuals who seek healing. Over the recent years, health and wellness have proven to be an everchanging act of self-love. When understanding health and wellness as a custom-made creative journey instead of a pressure filled, time-sensitive inconvenience, we heal. The level of responsibility and success in our health-state is best measured in how much we care, not in how correct we sound, or how much we’ve recovered. In healing, just like in art, there are no mistakes. Real progress happens from dedicated, insightful, and aware self-experimentation. And with the right amount of surrender, self-belief, and patience, the true masterpiece can be created.
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