What Is Well-Being?

Darren Beattie -

This is a blog dedicated to enhancing your quality of life by teaching you skills. Quality of life and well-being are synonymous.

Quality of Life:‘the degree to which a person enjoys the important possibilities of his or her life’

I offer up blog posts randomly to provide you with knowledge, skills, habits and behaviours that hopefully inspire you into action.

Action is after all the most important thing you can do if you’re trying to lose weight, improve performance, feel great, gain muscle mass or just get your life into balance.

Skill, however, is the foundational component to all of this, and that’s why you see it in the title of this new blog (this blog was originally titled The Art of Weight Loss…).

Developing skills means that you can adopt, manipulate and change habits. Adopting good habits and removing bad ones, means you can develop ideal behaviours.

Ideal behaviours lead to desired outcomes, whether that’s weight loss (a lot of what we discuss here), performance (not just athletic but your everyday performance too), muscle mass gain (a topic I aim to discuss more in future) or just general health and wellness.

Here, we don’t kill Peter to pay Paul ever.

I’m not trying to go against the grain, I just have a lot of concepts that you may think are unusual for a health and fitness blog.

I can assure you that they work, especially if you keep an open mind toward them.

“The conventional view serves to protect us from the painful job of thinking.”
~ John Kenneth Galbraith

All I ask is that you think critically about what I have to say and try to apply what you think will help you.

I’ve been a coach for 6 years now (2010), that’s ultimately what I’m passionate about.

My education lies in Fitness and Health Promotion, but the process of actually coaching people over the years has taught me that fitness is only one piece of the puzzle.

Though, in itself, physical change can influence other powerful changes in life, to truly help people I had to learn to approach physical change from a multi-faceted point of view too.

Enter, Well-Being…

Well-Being:‘the degree of balance one displays at any one time in the following dimensions of life.’

For that, there are seven different components or dimensions to consider if you want to develop skills and change your life:

  • Physical Dimension
  • Intellectual Dimension
  • Emotional Dimension
  • Spiritual Dimension
  • Social Dimension
  • Environmental Dimension
  • Occupational Dimension

Any one of the above aspects of well-being may be your limiting factor in terms of experiencing a fitter, happier, more productive you.

This is why I want to make you aware of your well-being so that you can also be aware that maybe you have adequate physical skills to fill your ideal body, and rather some other dimension may be limiting your physical progress instead.

During that process of coaching hundreds, maybe thousands of people at this point I’ve come to realize that a lot of the same stuff comes up again and again.

I wanted to share some of that stuff with everyone.

I hope you will want to share this information with everyone else you know too, and if you don’t, I want to hear from you (contact me).

By many estimates, over 50% of North America is now considered ‘overweight’ or ‘obese.’

Despite the many government campaigns, the popularity of fitness paraphernalia, and the huge increase in the number of health clubs we have access to, that percentage is one I’ve watched increase over the last 6 years.

Obviously what we’re doing is not working.

We are witnessing the first generation of children born with the assumption that they will not live longer than their parents, and if they do we’ll have wonderful medical technology to thank.

This is a setback in enjoying the possibilities of our lives, if it’s shortened by many years, but beyond that modern living has made us less physically engaged.

We don’t move as much.

We don’t cook as much.

We eat convenience-based foods more often (and often because they are ‘cheaper’).

We’ve lost that natural connection with our environment that our ancestors possessed a deep understanding of.

Do we want to be hooked up to machines to live?

Do we want to have to take pills or shots daily, to get through this month?

What about living our lives to the fullest?

When do we stop relying on pills, medications, and machines to live our lives for us?

It’s time to start using the medicine of movement, nutrition and mindset.

I believe the concepts I’m going to share in the years to come on this blog, may be able to contribute to a reversal of this trend if we all work together.

The Goal of This Blog:

Help others improve their skill as it relates to physical change and performance. Do it in a manner that enhances their quality of life. Give people more than just information. Give them an education in the science & art of movement, nutrition and psychology using practical, life-long applicable practices.

The goal is the journey, not a destination.