We meet guests from all around the world and have learned that everyone visits us to experience their own adventure. One thing that unites so many of our guests, however, is their quest to live a healthy life. Whether their focus is on food and nutrition or fitness and activity (or all of these), our guests appreciate the benefits that come from being active and healthy.
Living in a Blue Zone, we are naturally prone to being active, outside, and in touch with nature. We live an unplugged life and have a strong sense of community. But we do have work and homes and families to care for, we have responsibilities that can distract us from our best intentions for being fit and healthy. This is why we introduced the Florblanca Wellness Program. We wanted to give our staff extra opportunities and incentives for making wellness a priority everyday.
In May 2015, we introduced the Fitbit Challenge. We issued Fitbit activity trackers to our staff and challenged them to walk 10,000 steps/day for 6 months. We set up a leaderboard to show our progress and have incentive prize drawings along the way for everyone who meets these requirements. At the end of the 6 months, we will have a grand prize drawing to award a winner out of all our eligible staff members.
To further encourage our staff, we provided fitness training sessions with Jill Payne (@bodybyjill) every Friday through the month of August. We all learned excellent fitness moves and got inspired to work hard for our health.
Another part of our Florblanca Wellness Program focuses on nutrition. We brought all of our staff in for a cooking demonstration by Joanne Gerrard Young (The Healing Cuisine), a local chef who advocates a diet rich in locally sourced, whole organic foods. She presented us with a 3-hour workshop filled with information about the benefits of eating raw foods, ideas for preparing raw food dishes, cooking demonstrations, and tastings of several dishes she prepared right in our own kitchen. We were so impressed with this delicious food and the insight Joanne provided us about clean eating. Our staff had lots of questions and comments during this interactive demonstration and now we feel ready to incorporate Joanne’s ideas into our own diets.
We are seeing some amazing changes as a result of implementing the Wellness Program, including a renewed motivation for making health a priority in our everyday lives. We love having the opportunity at Florblanca to introduce a program like this one to remind ourselves that life is integrated, that our personal lives and our work lives reflect one another, and that health and wellness can be achieved with a few small adjustments to our daily routines.
#VIVAFlorblanca
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