Sponsored Content: WELLNESS WEDNESDAY: Salud says “hello” to healthy eating and a healthier you

This article is the first of a three-part series in collaboration with Salud Juicery. This article will cover an overview of health and wellness, the way food can impact you and your lifestyle, and how the changes we make in our lives can improve our overall wellness.

Salud Juicery is a juice and smoothie shop with five locations, four being in Pittsburgh and one being in Sewickley, Pennsylvania. Their newest location is in Oakland, at 3400 Fifth Avenue, just a few blocks away from the University of Pittsburgh and surrounding hospitals in the area.

Ginny Corbett is the CEO of Salud Juicery. She has been a therapist for the last 15 years and also works as a life coach. Through her experiences in the helping professions, she has gained and developed a lot of insight into the human experience that inspired her to begin Salud Juicery.

“The psychology model follows the medical model, when something’s wrong with you, doctors or other health professionals focus on your problem and how to fix it. You are not your problem, you a person with amazing potential. With the coaching model, we focus

less on your issue and more on your potential to move forward and be your best. It is a positive way to approach issues and challenges.”

The word salúd means “health” or “cheers”, which is what Salud Juicery aims to spread in every aspect of people’s lives. They aim to provide support that enables you to become your best self by helping people understand that the various dimensions of wellness aren’t isolated, but instead work and operate together as a system. It’s imperative to strike a balance when connecting our mind, body, and spirit, and at Salud they believe it all starts with the foods we eat.

“What you put in your body matters. Often, we believe things are food that aren’t food. There is a mixed up idea of what’s good for us. As a culture, we glorify sugar even though such added sugars are meant to be consumed sparingly,” Corbett said.

Their motto is “helping people reconnect with God’s good earth”, and they operate on the principle that the healthiest food you can eat is what comes out of the ground. Our bodies have become host to a series of diseases and problems, and they believe part of the reason for that is because so much of the food we eat is processed, and often has little to no nutritional value. They suggest tackling that by getting back to the basics and making better dietary choices including but not limited to fruits, vegetables, and foods from grains that all contribute to making us healthy, active, and strong. By doing so, we can improve our physical health which can subsequently impact other areas of our lives, such as socially and emotionally.

“Our bodies truly don’t know what to do with a Cheeto,” she laughed, “And millennials are recognizing that. The “healthy food is bad” mentality needs to stop. We have to demand better than that.”

When we try to make changes happen overnight, they often aren’t sustainable. Eating healthy is a lifestyle, and the best way in which we can begin to “reset” ourselves is by being armed with good information. When we become more educated about nutrition and how it relates to our overall wellness, we become more aware of what goes on around us and can make better choices one at a time with that information.

The second article of this series will focus on stress and anxiety, and specific tools we can use to combat it.

Sponsored by Salud Juicery