Wellness travel trends for 2020 reflect an increasing awareness about health issues and offer a chance to take time out and rebalance in pretty spectacular locations where it would be hard not to heal. From helping women navigate through the menopause to changing our diet, wellness travel trends focus on improving key aspects of our health and wellbeing and that can only be a good thing.

5 Top Wellness Travel Trends for 2020

1. #Mumcation
‘Mumcation’ can be a slightly annoying word but the concept is taking root and now even has its own hashtag. Common sense says that mums need time to recharge and psychology professor Dr Nava Silton made it official in an interview with Fox5NY (2-minute video). A healthy break without children can be essential to a mother’s wellbeing and therefore good for the children too. Whether just indulging in child-free time to read, walk and sleep or immersion in holistic therapies, Mum’s get to focus on themselves free from the day-to-day responsibilities of parenting and ideally return relaxed and refreshed for family life again.

2. Menopause Relief
At long last, there’s a greater awareness and new openness about discussing this old-as-the-hills process women go through. New retreats specifically aimed at helping women with health issues including the menopause, hormonal imbalance and weight gain are gaining momentum. Remember also that meditation, yoga, tai chi and mindfulness can help alleviate symptoms. Hopefully in the future, retreats offering support for menopausal women will be as common as going to a spa for a massage or facial.

3. Sugar ‘Detox’
The harmful effects of consuming too much sugar have been known for many years but there’s a growing awareness about its effects, like bloating, IBS, headaches, lack of energy and weight gain. You can read more about it in our blog on Easy tips for going sugar-free. The new debate also features in our blog on Sugar or fat, which is worse?
If you would like a bit more help reducing or even eliminating sugar from your diet, there’s a range of healthy and detoxifying holidays designed to make it easier to kick the ‘sugar habit’. Detoxing here doesn’t mean going without food just ridding the body of sugar and the cravings that accompany it. If you’re going to go cold turkey why not do it in amazing surroundings nourished by health experts, healthy organic foods and holistic treatments?

4. Sound Therapy
Sound therapy works through the healing power of sound vibration and frequencies. It follows the understanding that all of us have our own natural frequencies (including heartbeat, and other neurological and chemical body functions). When we are exposed to the external frequencies of singing bowls, gongs, tuning forks etc, the natural healing of both the body and mind can begin. For a deeper discussion including my personal experience of this, read our recent blog on sound therapy.

5. Colour Therapy
Similar to sound, light is a frequency; and the various colours in its spectrum have different frequencies. Colour therapy works through the healing power of light vibration and frequencies. It works on the theory that our energy centres, or chakras, throughout our body are activated and rebalanced by colours.
Colour therapy, also known as chromatherapy, has been practised since ancient times. Now an increasing understanding of the benefits of colour therapy is gaining momentum. Some yoga studios steep their classes in colour, sound and even scent, and a new hotel in St Louis, Missouri even has rooms entirely in one colour to channel specific moods, for example, red for passion, yellow for happiness and so on.

Many of the wellness travel trends for 2020 are achievable and sustainable practices, which you can find in our retreats.

Here’s to a happy and healthy year ahead!

Jo Fernandez is a leading UK travel journalist, with much of her career spent working for the London Evening Standard where she was Travel Editor until 2015. Now a freelance travel journalist and copywriter, she lives in Essex and has one daughter. As a travel expert, she still enjoys jetting off to write travel pieces, with favourite destinations including Mexico, Croatia and, of course, Essex.

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The sugar fat controversy.

For years, we’ve been told that fat, specifically animal fat, is bad for us. Now scientists have given saturated fat the all-clear – while they’ve named sugar ‘the new tobacco’ – bad for your health but promoted by big business. What’s the truth? Do we consume too much sugar or fat?

Saturated fat is actually good for you, according to much publicised new research [1].  It showed that 1983 guidelines to cut out fat were based on flawed research [2] and should never have been introduced. Far from piling on adipose tissues and clogging up the arteries – unlike sugar, fat is the healthy source of energy and even better are unsaturated fats like olive oil.

Sugar on the other hand is now recognised as the leading cause of obesity: a sugar rich diet produces excess insulin – which turns glucose into fat cells. Unlike fat, sugar also causes heart disease, diabetes and probably Alzheimer’s disease. And it’s addictive, creating an irresistible urge to eat and it makes you fat. And if you want to detox and lose weight, stay clear of sugar.

The tragedy is that 30 years ago scientists knew the risks of a diet rich in sugar. Pure, White and Deadly, a book published in 1972 by John Yudkin, Professor of Nutrition at London University, explained in detail how a sugar-rich diet causes furring of the arteries. But Yudkin was silenced by the food industry – and the anti-fat obsession became the prevailing health education message over the next 30 years.

During that time, UK  obesity levels have quadrupled almost certainly as a direct result of this confusion. A shocking expose in 2009, Sugar: The Bitter Truth [3], showed why we should have listened to Prof Yudkin:

Now a movie, Fed Up [4] produced by the American TV journalist, Katie Couric and dubbed: ‘the film the food industry doesn’t want you to see’, shows how the food industry, supported by mediocre nutritional research, nudged us into this unhealthy diet. You can watch it here:

Three steps to staying healthy.

1. Get educated: watch Fed Up and Sugar: The Bitter Truth.
2. Avoid low fat foods (apart from naturally fat free food and pure dairy products such as milk), alongside processed products, and sugary drinks.
3. Switch to a balanced diet – give your body enough of the healthy and energising fats.

See also our upcoming blog on Easy Tips to Go Sugar Free (by Denny) which includes tips for sugar free recipes.

References:
[1] openheart.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000196.fu
[2] sevencountriesstudy.com
[3] Sugar: The Bitter Truth www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oMom/#/page/home
[
[4] http://Fedupmovie.com

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