Natural hair and total body health??

The topic of this blog was suggested by my good friend and fellow curly Gabrielle! What she is saying makes a lot of sense and I would love to hear you alls opinions! I'll add my opinion to her topic at the end. Here is what she had to say:

I am ALL for the "natural hair movement" or whatever we are calling it these days. lol. Why aren't we as black women, focusing or using the natural hair platform to discuss topics such as prevention and health. We are the group of women that share a common bond due to the uniqueness of our hair. We are also the women that share a bond of being at high 

risk for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer and AIDS/HIV. If we take better of care of the "temple" in entirety, the hair growth will come (and a bonus: we will be better educated). I love that we as black women are accepting ourselves just as we are but we've got to start taking better care of ourselves too!! A gorgeous head of hair, with type II diabetes... makes no sense to me. If we can put the effort in our hair, why not our bodies and minds. Ok, I'm done. lol. 

I agree with what Gabrielle is saying regarding how there is an importance placed on the health of our hair over the health of our bodies. However, I do feel as there is a small sub movement within the natural hair community that is trying to focus on total body health as well as the health of your hair. A few examples of this include the following YouTubers:

beautifulbrwnbabydol

India from MyNaturalSistas

luvbeinnatural

I'm sure there are more examples but these are the three that I personally follow and know are constantly promoting living a healthy lifestyle and stressing how important it is to be healthy inside out! We as black women are at high risk for many health related diseases that were listed above. If we can come together and support one another like we do on our hair journeys, maybe we can do the same for our fitness journeys. If you follow me on Instagram (BesosFeron), you've seen two of my fitness updates. I'll try to post more as well as how being gluten free has affected my diet. I've had to almost avoid all fast food now due to everything involving bread in some way. Yes, I've been eating a lot of salads and soup lately and my body feels good! I'm less sluggish and have more energy. I stopped drinking sodas years ago and stopped eating candy. If I do have something sweet now, it's a small serving of ice cream and I'll drink a sprite or ginger ale for upset stomach but that's about it.

If you missed it, please refer to my blog post, "Obesity, the Silent Killer" posted on September 17 for more on the subject and also refer to the blog post, "How going natural has changed me" posted on October 26 to see how being natural has made me more health conscience. I totally agree with the statement made by Gabrielle stating, "a gorgeous head of hair with type II diabetes makes no sense!" It really doesn't.

When we were relaxed, we would use the excuse to not workout because we didn't want to sweat our hair out but now that we're natural, that's not an issue. Workout with your hair twisted up or braided up to keep your style and get your fitness on! I'm not saying you have to go hard core or anything, but eat well and try to get in 3-5 days a week of some sort of physical activity. 

So lets try to support one another to not only be on healthy hair journeys, but to be on healthy, fitness journeys as well because they really go hand in hand! I'd love to hear your thoughts and get feedback! Comment below or if you have a suggested topic feel free to let me know as well!

Besos, Feron