We are Wehl.

Because wellness is hard – there’s no quick fix, no single habit, no magic pill, no one size fits all, ignoring it doesn’t work AND you can’t outsource it to someone to do it for you – we created Wehl.  

Wehl was founded on the belief that taking a more natural, holistic and real-life approach to wellness is the best way to live well and that surrounding yourself with supportive, like-minded fellow human beings (online and offline) is the only way to sustain wellness habits for a lifetime. We were built for vitality and the people around us help us to live better and brighter!

The Journey Begins...

Wehl got its start when Jennifer Workman was determined to find a way to make maintaining healthy habits easier and more enjoyable for herself, her clients, her family and friends. She wanted to “be healthy” but struggled to find the daily motivation and accountability for the healthy, holistic habits she knew she should do (and others that had been prescribed by her wellness practitioners). She found the journey lonely. She knew she wasn’t the only one. She knew the research that proves social support is a key success factor for actually keeping our healthy habits along with the research behind the benefits of habit tracking. She realized that technology had the potential to do both – bring people together for wellness support + allow people to track their healthy habits in a fun, social way.

This all led to the idea for a practical, all-in-one healthy lifestyle app with the perfect combination of tools, tips and positive social connection. And, of course, it would have to truly be a “healthy” app - one that brings wellness to technology and facilitates a healthy relationship with tech – not addiction. Jennifer shared her idea with others and together they began a journey to build Wehl from scratch, with wellness in mind every step of the way.

Now, there’s a new kind of healthy lifestyle app to provide the tools, accountability and social support needed to help us keep wehlness habits in our busy, ever-changing world. Because, after all, wehlness habits are, and always will be, the secret superpower to living a better, more fulfilling life.

Jennifer’s personal wehlness journey has featured plenty of twists and turns. In her own words, here are the 3 experiences and corresponding “aha” moments that inspired Jennifer with the idea for Wehl:

1. A new, holistic wellness mindset – I was living an over-scheduled, busy life and struggling to achieve a balance between a busy, sedentary job, lengthy commute and other commitments. I was trying to live healthy by focusing on exercise and healthy eating but I didn’t realize that my body was slowly breaking down and burning out. There’s some irony here because my job was to promote health – meanwhile I was struggling to maintain my own. I was horrified to realize one day that I was becoming the “unhealthy health promoter” and forgetting what I learned in my education – true wellness is multi-dimensional. By re-focusing and being mindful to care for my own unique mind, spiritual, work, enviro, social AND my body wellness I began to see improvements.

2. Social Support is essential for health and wellness – The new holistic mindset made a definite difference but I was still struggling with the follow-through. I thought back to the research that indicates social support is a key factor in sustaining good habits to live healthy over a lifetime. I recalled that early in my career as a personal trainer, my clients lacked support for healthy habits between their sessions and I always thought they could make better progress if they had support between their appointments with me. Later in life, I experienced it myself too – wellness can be lonely and it’s challenging to make it a priority in our busy world. I wanted to connect with others who had similar healthy intentions and habit pursuits for daily motivation and accountability in between seeing my practitioners and friends in real-life.

3. Tech to HELP our wellness instead of compromising it – I realized the potential that technology had to not only provide social support but also the necessary tracking tools for sustaining wellness habits. On one hand, I could never find a simple-to-use, wellness-focused tracking app that fit my needs. On the other hand, I experienced the irony of spending several sedentary hours looking for healthy tips and inspiration on unhealthy, addictive platforms (often with toxic content, cultures and business practices). I felt like I was compromising my health in order to connect with people to support my health - it didn’t make sense. I believed that it didn’t have to be that way. Furthermore, I didn’t want to be online all the time nor did I want a separate app for every habit. I simply wanted a multi-purpose, healthy platform that could be a hub for comprehensive wellness support while facilitating a balance in my screentime. An app built with wellness truly at the core – from a healthy design and culture to health-facilitating content and tools to a trustworthy company with values that aligned with mine.

Overall, through my own personal wellness journey, I learned that much of healing and maintaining wellness comes down to fitting in daily wehlness habits with good, consistent social support (from others online, from wellness practitioners and from family and friends in real-life). Tracking habits, learning about wellness, and sharing healthy moments on Wehl has become a powerful way to use technology to incorporate more wellness into a busy lifestyle. There’s no cake but you can “get your social time and still have your wellness too”! It’s an incredible recipe for making great progress so that you can have more time and energy for the things and the people that you love! Thanks for reading and hope to see you on Wehl soon!           

  - Jennifer Workman, Founder of Wehl

On this journey, many awesome, talented people have come along to believe in Wehl and help build the platform from the ground up.  While it can be difficult to merge the demands of building a technology company with wellness, we’re committed to practicing a “culture of wehlness” in our work. We try to always be mindful that work is only one component of our wehlness! You can find us working remotely (mostly in and around Toronto) and meeting up in real-life as often as we can! 

We want to thank everyone who has supported Wehl in the journey so far in varying capacities from research assistance, to interview feedback and survey completion, to beta testing, to consultation and cheerleading. We’re grateful to each person who has contributed to us making steps towards achieving our mission!

Interested in getting involved?

Feedback
We’re building Wehl for and with our members. We’re grateful for all of the feedback and positivity we’ve received so far. Our goal is to continue to listen to you, our members, and keep improving based on your suggestions, needs and pursuits. Please head to our Contact Us page anytime to fill in the form with your ideas. You can also provide feedback via email.

Spread the word
We want to have a wide reach and help others live healthier lives and feel their best.  We believe Wehl is a great place to find your wehlness routine and get support along the way. If you know people who are interested in improving their wellness, please tell them about the support they can get by joining Wehl.

Share your talents
If you are interested in sharing your talents with us, send us an email and tell us about how you would like to get involved. We love working with people and organizations who share our mission and are passionate about wellness!

Our journey building Wehl has been much like our own personal wellness journeys – full of highs and lows, challenges, risks, failures, opportunities, joy and excitement. And, cheesy as it may sound, it really has been social support that has helped us push through and stay laser-focused on achieving our mission. It’s been about plenty of faith and positivity and taking imperfect baby steps forward.

We’re on this journey together. We want to collaborate, as professionals, organizations and real people to not only keep ourselves accountable but also make an impact. What we focus on grows and we’re focused on growing more wehlness and good in the world.

Thanks for reading about our Wehl journey so far. With your continued participation and feedback there will be much more to come. 

We can’t do it without you and invite you to join us. We hope Wehl will help you on your wehlness journey.