What’s new?
- Better understand key aspects of your own wellness
- Discover your Wellness Score
- Get practical insights into your wellbeing and how to improve
With all the health advice out there, where on earth do you begin when it comes to improving your wellbeing? Your Evergreen Life app already lets you combine your personal health data with your electronic medical record. This latest update introduces your Wellness Score from which you can learn how to become your own wellness expert* and help you be as well as you can be. You’ll be able to monitor your own progress, as well as share what you discover with others if you decide to, helping others improve their wellness too. You know the most about you already, so you’re best placed to notice what works for you.
What is wellness anyway?
Wellness can be defined as “A state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” But the experience of wellness is individual and is interpreted in different ways by different health and wellness specialists. Wellness is an active process of becoming aware of and making choices towards a healthy and fulfilling life. The Evergreen Life wellness score helps you understand the things our team of experts have found that people do to achieve wellness. It also helps you keep track of any early signs that you have something to address to stay well. Despite the overload of information to avoid long term diseases, obesity, type 2 diabetes and heart disease across the UK are at an all-time high. Basically, there’s a lot more for us to learn so that we can all avoid this happening to us – and that’s where your Wellness Score comes in…
Your starting point – what’s your Wellness Score?
Now you can start becoming aware of what wellness is to you by creating your own wellness score in the Evergreen Life app. You can get started by clicking tapping on the centre of your home screen and switching the Wellness Score on. By curating your own personal health record, you’ll get health insights based on information you enter and answers you give to your Wellness Checks, which are available in the app. It’s entirely your choice what you add to your record. The more information you have about your own health that’s personal to you, the better equipped you will become. You’ll get helpful health and wellbeing information and articles based on your answers to help you live a healthy, happy and fulfilling life – and it’s all easily accessible from your phone – bonus!
Your Wellness Score consists of six key aspects: Food, Fitness, Happiness, DNA, GP services and Health Records. In the middle of these six segments is a score out of 100 – this is your Wellness Score. Your Wellness Score lets you know if anything you have answered or entered indicates that you might need to change something to be as well as you can be. If you use the app to explore the different aspects of your wellness, you’ll see which references we’ve used to offer this information.
If your score is 100, it means you are doing everything you can do, from the questions you have answered so far, to be as well as you can be. As time goes by, you’ll be able to form a fuller picture of your health and wellbeing with new questionnaires and information.
What are Wellness Checks?
Our in-app Wellness Checks are based on research to provide you with useful and personalised insights into your health and wellbeing. The Wellness Checks cover a wide range of health-related topics, such as your eating habits, fitness levels and happiness practices. From your answers, you’ll be offered information and steps that you might like to try towards improving your overall health and wellbeing.
Our scoring method is all about helping you understand what Wellness Experts from different areas would advise to avoid ill health and long-term conditions. If you already have long term conditions, this advice will help you minimise your symptoms, possibly even reverse them.
The Wellness Checks and Score have all been informed by referenced questionnaires, published references and various professionals and organisations. Research has been reviewed by our Evergreen Life Wellness Experts.
Why discover more about your wellness?
Bottom line: we want to help you know if you’re doing all you can to stay well.
In the UK we’re facing a huge health challenge – affecting our quality of life and costing the NHS billions every year. Chronic conditions such as stress, diabetes and heart disease presenting earlier on in life are affecting our amount of ‘wellness years.’ For example, women in the UK spend the last 19 years of their life in ‘ill health.’ Quality of health and wellbeing has also been linked to our environment; people living in the most deprived areas can expect to spend nearly 20 years in poorer health, compared with those in the least deprived areas.
But it’s not all bad news – both life expectancy and healthy life expectancy have been on the rise since 2000. The population is now living longer and spending more years in good health. However, life expectancy has increased by more years than healthy life expectancy, so the number of years lived in poor health has also increased slightly.
Almost all approaches to wellbeing can be challenged. For example: eggs. Once thought to be an unhealthy food with high cholesterol, most now agree that eggs are a superfood. Butter and other full-fat foods remain controversial, with many health coaches suggesting “it’s not fat that makes you fat” whilst NHS Choices recommends reducing fat intake to lose weight.
Equally, the fitness industry recommends increasing protein in our diet, yet there is some evidence that this may cause some problems for individuals.
Another common question is “does this apply specifically to me?” For example, most GPs measure BMI (Body Mass Index), but if you’re a rugby player or were big and muscular for other reasons, you could have an “unhealthy” BMI and yet actually be very well.
A new kind of research
Most research shows that a population has better health when people adopt certain lifestyle, dietary and positive mental wellbeing practices. However, turning this into personalised advice is quite tricky and can be very general based on what’s good for the average person.
By asking questions to a large group about their wellness habits via the Evergreen Life app, we can create an information bank – and share that with you! We’ll be able to show trends and share approaches that “people just like you” do to stay well rather than relying on generalised research. This means that more users can personalise their approach to wellbeing.
But remember the Evergreen Life ethos… it’s your data: you own it, you share it. Basically, it’s completely up to you if you want to join this service, it’s optional, you could simply use the app for the other features.
A shared path to better wellness
If you have a friend or a loved one that you would like to help understand their wellness then why not refer the Evergreen Life App to them using the referral button? That way you can all benefit from understanding more and motivate each other along the way to improve.
Over time, Evergreen Life app users will be able to help others and themselves stay well. With your score as a guide we believe you’ll start to notice what changes help you – and with your feedback you can tell us so we can all improve.
Want to start your wellness journey? Download the Evergreen Life app and start living an Evergreen Life.
Need help creating your Wellness Score? Check out our four steps to personalising your wellness.
*the advice given is not medical advice. Any improvements suggested in the Wellness Score are based on researched and referenced medical journals and articles, but if you’re unsure of any advice consult with your healthcare professional.