Learning to Experience Wellness in a Hot, Flat, Crowded and Polluted World

The great writer and columnist Thomas Friedman describes what is meant by a Hot, Flat and Crowded world in his book of the same name. Hot is about the rising temperatures of the worlds environment. Crowded is about exploding population growth. Flat is about how interconnected and interdependent the world is today. Pollution is at it's highest level world wide and growing. Our world is also increasingly reaching levels of pollution not seen before.



Experiencing wellness in such a world can be challenge. With food producers so focused on profits that they will include any ingredient no matter how unhealthy into their foods if there is a profit to be squeezed out. Genetically modifying seeds to control farming worldwide and producing foods that are showing alarming negative health effects, all for greater profits for large corporations.

Experiencing wellness requires clean nutrition rich foods, fresh water, clean air, consistent exercise, control of stress and a reasonably unpolluted environment.

Very few of these requirements are being sustainably cultivated for the main stream in society.

Processed foods have to often replaced natural nutritious fresh foods in most American diets.

Fresh water is getting harder to come by for free so many people drink tap water that contains chlorine, fluoride and other chemicals. Or they are actually drinking tainted water that causes health problems.

Our air is now filled with pollutants from a variety of sources from industry to autos to household products sprayed into the air and from products that exhaust toxins into the air for many months after they are purchased and put into use.

Many if not most people live sedentary lives with very little to no healthful levels of consistent exercise.

Stress in our complex modern world is at an all time high. Just functioning with all the is expected from us today causes stress that causes many kinds of health issues.

So how do we get and stay healthy in a hot. flat and crowded world. It's not easy but it can be done. It requires reaching for new levels of consciousness. We have to begin focusing on putting the dots together to see the full picture. Each lifestyle choice we make leads to a positive or negative health consequence. The single biggest mistake people are making is waiting for illness and disease to strike before taking any action to change and choose healthy lifestyle choices. Once we are sick our focus goes totally to combating the symptoms of our illness, most often with drugs. Once we feel OK or good again we resume our unhealthy lifestyle until the next alarm signal from our body. We don't actually heal the root causes of our illness we just mask the symptoms.

By changing how we deal with our health we must start the process of developing health consciousness. Health consciousness means you look at all your lifestyle choices from the lens of whether the choice is positive or negative for our wellness.

We have to make at least 90 percent healthy lifestyle choices to experience and maintain wellness. We can afford about 10 percent of our choices to be unhealthy choices and still hope to maintain your wellness.

Changing your focus and perspective about what it takes to create wellness and why it is important to you is key to achieving true wellness.