Q: How is your book different from other health and wellness books on the market?

A: The WellnessOptions book provides Western, natural, and Oriental medical and health perspectives in one book. It also addresses different health aspects, including physical, mental, emotional, environmental, and spiritual wellness, and discusses both treatment options and preventive healthy lifestyle choices. My book is well researched and quotes source references like medical journals, but explains medical and health issues in easy-to-understand language.

Q: What is the book about?

A: This book shares the comprehensive, all-encompassing WellnessOptions living and health philosophy, which believes that we can achieve optimal well-being in sickness and in health; that we are entitled to choose how to be well; that health is a continuing process affecting us every day; and that we need reliable health information to make wise wellness choices. We can achieve optimal living by developing, step-by-step, our own wellness strategies, maximizing what are available that are best for us physically, psychologically, emotionally, and practically.

Q: What does wellness mean to you and how do you personally apply optimal wellness in your life?

A: An optimal sense of well-being means the greatest possible sense of harmony and contentment that can well up from within you, the sense that you and everybody else and everything else is fine. This leads to optimal living—living to the fullest, maximizing all your potential, including health potential. Wellness is more than health; it prepares you to combat sickness when it occurs. Optimal wellness is not a goal; it is what we strive for and work toward. It is a process. The point is to live well, live to the fullest, creating values using what is in us, around us, and available to us.

Q:What saved you in your personal journey to wellness?

A: My life suddenly fell apart. I lost 23 pounds in two weeks, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and my husband asked for a divorce. I wasn't prepared for any of this, and I was exhausted physically, mentally, and spiritually. Behind all this trauma was also a deep regret and a big question mark: how could I have tread on through life for so many years assuming it is permanent when I should have known better? How could I be so unaware of the process of living and all its potential as I went through the motions of living? I obviously wasn't living to the fullest if I had no idea what was happening in my physical, emotional, and family life. Life may just be there for us, but we need to make conscious efforts to choose well-being and optimal living. All the lessons and realizations that came from my experiences, including illness and cancer, and all the things that I've learned from other people, including their life perspectives and health knowledge, have proven invaluable.

Q: What did your motorcycle accident teach you about the concept of wellness?

A: It made me realize that I didn't want to die. But, as everybody has to die, the goal of life is not to overcome death, I've learned. The challenge is to feel well and to stay feeling well even to the very end. The accident also helped me realize two fundamental truths about life: when facing death, I finally realized the value of life, including its difficulties, such as my cancer, etc. And from there, I've come to realize life's many joys. Secondly, I learned that when a moment is framed and frozen in memory and, in essence, as a complete, fully lived and experienced moment, it becomes eternal.

Q: Explain what you mean when you say it's possible to be well in sickness and in health.

A: The World Health Organization defines health as a complete state of physical, psychological, and social well-being, a resource for optimal living. When we are healthy, or un-sick, we have the tool to achieve optimal well-being and living. But we may or may not use this tool, so we may or may not be feeling this sense of optimal well-being, as defined above. Many of us may be physically un-sick, but unhappy with ourselves, with others, with circumstances, and unfulfilled. On the other hand, even when I had cancer, I was enjoying the colours of the leaves, the taste of Coke, the air, the sun ... and feeling a great sense of well-being. This sense of well-being probably played an important role in my recovery. Everything affects everything else. My thoughts and emotions affect my sleep and appetite, which in turn affect my immune response and my ability to fight an illness and to recover.

Q: What are the common obstacles to achieving wellness?

A: There are many. Some we inherit, some we let others and the environment impose on us, but most we create for ourselves. For example, genetic factors only account for about 30 percent of how we age. Ultimately, how well we age and whether we're subjected to the common diseases associated with aging are determined mostly by how we live.