The Tao of Wellness

Being Well and Being Free from Illness Are Not the Same

After years working in the weight management field, Dr. Wyatt realized there was more to people reaching and maintaining their goals than just knowing how to do it. Her experiences led her to the theories of life transformation and lifestyle wellness and took her down a path to become a lifestyle change specialist. 

At the Translational Science Symposium on Midlife Wellbeing held in advance of the 2021 Annual Meeting of the North American Menopause Society, Dr. Wyatt, professor at The University of Alabama Birmingham Department of Nutrition Sciences, talked about what wellness means and what it means to be well. She helped healthcare providers think about how to define wellness, discussed possibilities to measure it, and offered her thoughts on how to help patients achieve it. 

Dr. Wyatt made the important distinction between wellness and not being sick. As she related, “when I ask my patients what being well means to them, many will say it is not having or preventing a specific disease, or not taking a certain medication, or not being in chronic pain.” While all that may be true for some, freedom from disease is proving not to be a complete definition. Wellness involves a journey to improve and maintain your physical and mental health in order to fully engage and live your best life. It is a path, a belief, and most definitely a way of being. It is much more about recognizing and optimizing what one can do than what one can’t. It involves creating a body state, mind state, and a lifestyle that can support you in that life.”

Living Your Best Life

She gave these takeaways for individuals:

• Wellness is a way of living and experiencing your life in a way that brings you joy and fulfillment.
• You can have diabetes, cancer or any medical condition and still be WELL.
• Lifestyle wellness is a specific type of wellness that is impacted by your way or style of living. Your body state, mind state, nutrition, activity level, and sleep all may impact lifestyle wellness.

For those of us that are living with a chronic condition, this is an important re-framing of being well. For all of us, knowing that we have control over those levers – body state, mind state, nutrition, activity level and sleep – and learning to view those as major contributors to wellness feels pretty empowering.

This information was presented at the Translational Science Symposium “Charting the Path to Health in Midlife and Beyond: The Biology and Practice of Wellness” held in advance of the 2021 Annual Meeting of The North American Menopause Society in Washington, DC. Excerpts from the Translational Science Symposium are presented as part of the Live From #NAMS2021: The Latest Breakthroughs in Women’s Midlife Wellness series published by Women Living Better and Lisa Health with permission from NAMS. Please visit Lisa Health and Women Living Better to find more information and recommendations from top experts in menopause, midlife health, and healthy aging.