I went to Okinawa expecting a beautiful beach vacation, but came home with something much more valuable:
A different way of thinking about wellness.
Okinawa is recognized as one of the world’s “Blue Zones,” rare places on the planet known for an unusually high prevalence of longevity. Simply put, people tend to live quality lives past the age of 100. Okinawa, in particular is home to the world’s longest living women. The Blue Zones framework identifies several lifestyle patterns associated with long, quality lives. They include natural movement, having a sense of purpose, stress reduction, social connection and eating mostly a plant-forward diet.
You may have heard of it, or maybe not. But here’s what I had no way of understanding from only reading about the Blue Zones in a book and watching the National Geographic special on TV: you have to experience the Blue Zone lifestyle before your can really understand it.
You have to watch a 100-year old looking person — with full mobility and a full head of hair — walking uphill with a laundry basket before it clicks. You have to sit down for a meal that seems to have no incentives for being rushed before the lightbulb goes off. You have to experience the warmth of people whom you don’t know but who welcome you anyway before the “aha” moment comes.
You have to notice how differently people seem to think about nourishment, imperfection and community.
Below are seven lessons I brought home from my trip to Okinawa and three other cities (Kyoto, Osaka and Tokyo) after a summer tour of Japan with my husband, son and three of our family friends who have relatives who left the U.S. to take up permanent residence there.
1. Move naturally. Don’t wait until it’s “time to work out”
One of the first things I noticed was how much the older people in Japan, particularly Okinawa, moved. I saw adults looking close to triple digits in age walking through town, pushing laundry carts uphill, carrying groceries across busy streets and alley ways, and moving through their daily routines with ease.
I didn’t see a fitness gym anywhere in the towns I visited outside of Tokyo. People were simply living.
That distinction matters, according to Blue Zones evangelist Dan Buettner, a National Geographic Fellow, explorer and journalist who developed the framework. Natural movement, preaches Buettner, is all about designing your daily routine so that movement happens throughout the day, instead of depending largely on a formal workout.
It made me think about how many of us approach wellness. We sit in our cars, driving to work only to sit at a desk all day, then come home to decompress from the day on our sofas. Then, we tell ourselves we need to find a fitness routine that “works.”
Maybe the Okinawan way is simpler:
Walk more. Take the stairs. Relax on a mat.
Your body doesn’t necessarily need you to ‘kill it at the gym’ or ‘crush it’ with a kickboxing class. Maybe, your muscles and bones just need more opportunities to move with impact and in a meaningful way.
2. Food isn’t just fuel. It’s an experience.
I ate some of the freshest, and most unique (to me) seafood dishes I’ve ever had in Okinawa. Fish and crustaceans are an important part of the region’s food culture.
Yet, a large part of Okinawan cuisine emphasizes eating vegetables, plant-based proteins, seaweed, fruits like Yuzu — a citrus that tastes like a cross between a lemon and an orange — and other foods like Ube, purple yams (which I had previously learned from Mariah Carey are full of anti-oxidants)! They also eat pork (a meat vilified in the West), which is more prominent than chicken there.
Though, research on Okinawan longevity has plainly pointed to a balanced diet containing an abundance of vegetables alongside herbs, like ginger, and fish proteins.
I found found — through the exploration of my sweet tooth — that nothing sweetened in Japan was too sweet. Just a touch of sugar and a dash of honey seemed to decorate, rather than inundate, Japanese desserts.
Then there was the experience of eating…
I saw that meals, especially breakfast and dinner, weren’t something to squeeze in between daily activities. They unfolded. A single vegetable dish served as a course, then came a deep-fried sea creature (I think I ate the tentacle of a very unlucky swimmer at one meal)! Next came something deep fried and familiar — a shrimp tempura lightly salted! Then the unfamiliar, chewy, delicious in taste and beautiful in its presentation.
The expectation wasn’t that every dish would arrive to the table at the same time (my petpeeve at American restaurants). But, there was an intentional rhythm to the meal.
Restaurants sometimes offered omakase, allowing the chef to select the courses. We tried this twice — once in Okinawa and again in Kyoto.
My family and I respected the chef’s culinary talents as we would art framed in a gallery. We took servers’ advice. We put our phones down and invested in our little community seated at the dinner table.
We stayed awhile.
We let food be thy medicine and medicine thy food, as the saying goes.
3. Protect your skin like your future depends on it
As a Black woman, I was fascinated by how seriously people in Japan took sun protection.
I saw women and men wearing sun hats, protective clothing (from full face covers to rash gaurads for the legs, feet and toes) at the pool and beach! There was an almost universal understanding that enjoying the sun and protecting yourself from it can happen simultaneously.
So, I came home thinking differently about sunscreen.
There is a legitimate regulatory difference between the United States and countries such as Japan when it comes to sun protection creams. For years, the U.S. has had fewer approved sunscreen filters than many other countries. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that sunscreens sold outside the U.S. can contain a wider variety of chemical UV filters, as reported by NBC news just last week.
But there’s an important update: the FDA approved bemotrizinol in 2026, making it the first new sunscreen active ingredient approved under the U.S. OTC pathway since 1999.
So my takeaway isn’t that American sunscreen is ineffective. It’s that — with melanoma being one of the most preventable cancers, according to a report I wrote citing research from The Skin Cancer Foundation — maybe sun protection could be taken more seriously. This is especially potent for women like me who often think our melanin-rich skin is enough to bypass skin cancer.
After my vacation, I dug a little deeper and found that the American Academy of Dermatology recommends broad-spectrum, water-resistant SPF 30 or higher for everyone. For people with caramel, brown-butter and chocolate-colored skin, tinted sunscreen containing iron oxide can also help protect against visible light that contributes to hyperpigmentation, according to the Academy.
The longevity lesson I learned while in Okinawa: Protect the glow you’ve got.
4. You don’t have to look like everyone else to belong
This one was personal. For several days, my family and I were among the only Black people we saw. At our resort, at the airport and around town, there were very few people who didn’t look Asian. There weren’t even that many Europeans in Okinawa, and I didn’t see a Latino for weeks (until I got back to the U.S.)! When I spoke to kind people around us, I learned they were from different cities in Japan, or on vacation from China, Korea or other parts of Asia. Yet, I never felt like I was being judged.
Nobody stared at me disapprovingly (like the times I had traveled in the American South and Northeast) when I walked onto the beach or pool deck in my bikini with all my mocha-latte colored skin beaming against the background of blue waters.
People smiled. They made small talk with us. We floated harmoniously together and even took photos together after hours of fun in the sun at the pool and beach. They guided us through their language. We felt welcomed.
That experience reminded me that wellness isn’t only about your blood pressure, your diet or your skincare routine. Sometimes wellness is simply feeling physically and psychologically safe in an environment.
For women who spend their lives navigating unfair workplaces, nuanced social spaces and institutionalized setbacks where they may be “the outsider,” the feeling of being safe can be profound.
For weeks, I didn’t have to explain my existence in a space.
My husband, son and I could simply be.
That felt good, like a real glow-up.
5. Slow down. Your life is not on deadline.
This may have been one of my favorite lessons.
In the U.S., we’re so accustomed to multitasking that even a lunch break can feel like another item on the “to-do” list. And that’s if your workplace culture doesn’t have an unwritten rule about taking lunch breaks. Team “#nosleep” and “#hustlehard” are popular catch phrases on U.S. social media. But in Japan, I experienced each day as an occasion.
Food came in courses. Conversations had room to breathe. People weren’t necessarily trying to finish everything as quickly as possible.
Suddenly, I understood something: Slowing down can be a form of luxury.
The Blue Zones framework includes downshifting, or regular practices that help people manage stress, as one of its longevity principles.
You don’t have to travel 7,000 miles like I did to practice it.
Try having one meal this week without your phone. Don’t eat standing up, in your car or while answering messages.
Sit (with your napkin in your lap)! Then eat… pray… love… laugh!
Stay a while.
6. What if you stopped crying over the broken parts?
One of the most beautiful ideas I encountered in Japan was the concept of kintsugi, the traditional art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold.
Learning about this philosophy was heart-filling for me.
A cracked bowl, cup or vase becomes more valuable after it was broken and put back together, than when it was in its original state, after using this technique.
The shattered parts, after repair, then become a part of the object’s beautiful history with golden seams that hold the cracks together strongly.
Kintsugi, I learned is very hard to shop for. One must almost experience the brokeness to benefit from the golden outcome. It is real Japanese craft, not simply a motivational metaphor.
The art of not trashing something just because it’s broken is even documented by The Smithsonian, where historians there describe it as a technique that highlights, rather than conceals an object’s damage, while Japan‘s national tourism organization connects it with the Japanese aesthetic of embracing imperfection.
How many of us Glowgetters spend years trying to hide the places where we’ve been broken?
- A difficult childhood.
- A career disappointment.
- A friendship that ended.
- A mistake we replay in our heads years after the event.
After visiting a Blue Zone, I don’t know if I want to be the woman who presents as if she’s never been broken.
I want to be the woman who broke, healed, learned from it and became more valuable because of what she overcame.
That’s the real glow-up. Wouldn’t you agree?
7. Be proud of your culture, but careful not to disparage others
Japan’s relationship with its cultural heritage was impossible to miss. One of the most powerful things I witnessed was the reverence given to its historic places.
I visited Kiyomizu-dera in Kyoto, a Temple built circa 778. The Temple was constructed in honor of the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Over the past 1,200+ years there were at least five attempts to destroy this place of worship and burn it to the ground. Through the grace of God, neither man nor Mother Nature has been successful in shaking its foundation. To this very day the Temple, notably built like a Jenga tower without nails, is still standing strong. It is now a World Heritage Site, protected by UNESCO, and open to the faithful from all walks of life to come and bask in the glory of its presence and light.
Standing there, I couldn’t stop thinking about the concept of resilience. People have tried to destroy this place. Fire has destroyed its buildings. Yet, it still stands.
I felt as if the deeper lesson that can be gained from visiting this place is about so much more than awe-inspiring structures. It is about perseverance when the world tries to take a Glow Girl down.
In the words of Oprah Winfrey, “How we overcome!”
Japan’s history also includes periods of deliberate isolation, including when the renowned samurai Tokugawa shogunate’s sakoku policies closed Japan off to the outside world for 50 years to focus on building up national pride with their people. That history is more complicated than the idea that a military leader simply “closed the borders for 50 years,” but the broader lesson I took away was that culture can be intentionally preserved, cultivated and passed forward.
That made me think about my own culture. What legacies are we preserving? Who is telling our stories? What are we teaching our children? What traditions are we at risk of disappearing?
Being proud of one’s culture — and all it’s broken pieces — can be a mental wellness practice, too.
Okinawa in the rear view mirror
I went to Japan looking for a respite from the rabbit race. But what I found was a way of life that I’ll try to connect to for the rest of my days.
Move with meaningful intent. Commune over quality cuisine. Protect your glow. Love where you come from.
Slow down.
Heal the broken parts. Someday they’ll be worth more than the original.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly:
Build a life that gives you reasons to be excited to wake up each day.
Longevity isn’t simply about adding years to your life. It’s about adding quality to your years.
That’s a way of being worth taking home from any vacation, Blue Zone or not.
Share this with a woman who needs permission to slow down, protect her peace and enjoy life.
Glow Stream TV Editorial Note: Blue Zones are a useful framework for exploring lifestyle patterns associated with longevity, but they do not establish that any single behavior causes a person to live longer. Individual health outcomes are influenced by genetics, environment, healthcare access, socioeconomic factors and many other variables. This article is a travel reflection informed by the Blue Zones framework and cited research—not medical advice.
