The Karma Of Wellness
I am fascinated by the power of karma in our lives.
Karma means action, work, or deed. The term also describes the spiritual principle of cause and effect, known as the principle of karma. In a nutshell, the actions of an individual (cause) influence that individual’s future (effect): with good intent and good deeds leading to positive outcomes and harmful intentions and acts leading to adverse outcomes.
Increasing our Vitality, Longevity & Overall Wellness
As a culinary wellness coach, I am obsessed with the power of our little daily habits and their ability to influence our wellness destiny. I like to think of this as wellness karma. When we create practices in our lives around sleep, hydration, physical activity, food, and mindfulness, they profoundly influence our health and happiness. Knowing this, we can alter our behaviors, harness their energy, and create good karma. One of the best places to start is at the end of our fork.
Every time we eat, we choose to support or diminish the healing capabilities of our bodies. What we eat and drink has a profound effect on our health, happiness, and productivity. Healing our bodies also helps to heal our minds. As humans, we are an ecosystem. When we honor our bodies with the things they need to thrive, we are rewarded by looking good, feeling great, and staying well. When one area is out of sync, it affects everything. We no longer feel bullet-proof, our bodies don’t respond like they used to, and we feel old.
Living younger, longer, and better is an attainable goal. By changing our lifestyle, starting with our little daily habits, we can actually “hack” our body’s biology, increasing our vitality and longevity.
Our 21st-century Lifestyles
As incredible as this sounds, it’s actually our 21st-century lifestyle that complicates things. Our modern conveniences and technologies, the very things that have improved so many areas of our lives, have negatively impacted others, especially when it comes to food.
Never before in history has food been so industrialized. From farming and seed manipulation to processing and manufacturing, nutrients disappear, chemicals appear, and healthy eating becomes a moving target.
Inflammaging
It’s challenging to create wellness karma when consuming things our bodies struggle to process and metabolize. Things like too much sugar, chemical additives, sodium chloride, modified fats, refined carbohydrates, and large amounts of industrialized animal protein create inflammaging in our bodies. Inflammaging is chronic low-level inflammation that not only accelerates the aging process but contributes to every lifestyle disease we never want to have.
It Starts in the Kitchen
If we want to flip the switch on behaviors around food the place to start is in the kitchen. Creating new habits in the heart of our homes. Changing the energy around cooking and eating. Clearing the counters of clutter. Tossing expired pantry items, condiments and freezer burned antiquities. Removing foods containing artificial ingredients, added sugars and refined carbohydrates. Making new this old room and opening space for good karma.
The second half of life is an excellent time to edit habits that no longer serve us and welcome vitality into our lives. We can choose to banish artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes, drink more water, learn to eat a predominantly plant-based diet, and commit to honoring our bodies. We can change the input (cause) to create a different outcome (effect). And we can put the wellness odds in our favor by choosing foods that build resilient wellness instead of defaulting to eating habits that steal our life force.
The simple act of eating intentionally, done repeatedly, serves as the foundation for positive change. And the second half of our lives offers an amazing opportunity to finally get things right with our bodies. It’s not too late and we are never too old to create wellness karma.
Kristen Coffield
I am a passionate advocate for food as medicine, life navigator and culinary coach. This is my space for sharing what excites, inspires and motivates me to live my best life. It began as a recipe blog for nourishing, simple, weekday meals and has become something much bigger… a guide to resilient wellness. I am excited to share my knowledge of how daily habits can cumulatively help you to live like you mean it and age like you want to.
