In honor of Black History Month, Sofia Health is recognizing and celebrating the accomplishments of our BIPOC practitioners who are making an impact in the world of health and wellness.
Winifredah Lungu: Health Coach and Personal Chef
Tell us a little bit about yourself, your business & your mission.
My business is called Optimize Kare. Its mission is to optimize people's potential to care about themselves in order to heal holistically. This is done through healthy foods, mind & bodywork, self-care, spirituality using modalities that resonate with the client. They are all connected in order to be whole again. We may also refer clients to do other modalities which we don't do in our program but which may benefit the client. Our programs are done either one on one, group sessions, workshops, or live streams. The mission of Optimize Kare is to make healing fun, productive, and sustainable because having been in that place of pain and discomfort, it is empowering to be able to help others who seek to be well again but don't know where to begin or who to talk to.
Describe one of your proudest accomplishments.
My proudest accomplishments have been leaving my job to concentrate on further studying and setting up my business. Many people thought I was crazy because I had no means to support myself and was a single mum. Furthermore, I got seriously sick and was on the verge of death. But through perseverance, I recovered, but that was a wake-up call about how truly the mind, body, spirit connection is vital for wholeness. Through the healing journey, I learned a lot about different aspects of healing modalities that one size doesn't fit all but is more about listening to your inner self to see what works best for you. Before being sick, I either shunned certain practices because it was ingrained in my brain that they were evil or quackery and that only Western medicine & traditional herbs worked. But after researching deeply on why people were using other modalities and getting results, I knew that being closed-minded is usually the reason many continue being sick. I enrolled in various courses about nutrition, diet, lifestyle, chef course, spirituality, neuroplasticity, heart & mind coherence, breathwork, meditation, etc to heal myself. I'm still on the discovering 'this self" journey to learn more about myself and what a great being human beings are in terms of what they are capable of given the right environment to know their potential.
How do you hope your work will impact/encourage/influence future generations?
I hope my work will help future generations in a way where people of all ages can come to a place where they can get the healing they need in these tough modern times. Right now in our country we face a lot of suicides, GBV, defilement, crimes, mental health issues, weight issues, chronic illnesses, etc which were unheard of these past 20 years because it was either culturally unacceptable to talk about them, or in most cases society expected you to just keep it low & take it as a man/woman. But now people can't face the day to day challenges of modern life there's no place to help them.
What are your goals for 2021?
My goals for 2021 are:
- To get more people aware that loving oneself is key to relating better to others, managing issues, and avoiding certain ailments.
- To teach people that you cannot use an old mindset to live in modern times. Ignorance is NOT bliss!!
- To show people that there is always a way to heal.
Connect with Winifredah
at SofiaHealth.com
