Is Lifestyle Medicine the Best Medicine For You?
A friend Charlotte confessed over her favorite soda, “My blood pressure has gone sky high. It’s time to take a break from this (looking at her glass with a hint of sadness) for a while.”
From our conversation, I learned that my busy friend has been living a sedentary life. She works from home and is literally living on food deliveries.
Forget about aerobic activity; she doesn’t have time to move around.
Charlotte doesn’t like the idea of being dependent on medicine. As a result, she seldom takes her maintenance medicine.
Should Charlotte take a different kind of medicine? Let’s find out shortly.
The Not So Funny Truth about Lifestyle
Here’s a funny line by columnist Doug Larson about food,
“Life expectancy would grow by leaps and bounds if green vegetables smelled as good as bacon.”
While it’s true that it takes effort to walk the healthy path, it’s equally difficult to stay the course.
“I tend to get burnt out and I tend to go to a lot of family gatherings and different social gatherings on the weekends, which means plenty of food and many skipped workouts.”
How can we address the excuses we make when it comes to lifestyle?
We make ourselves accountable to our health - health concerns, issues and outcomes.
As Jim Rohn said, “Take care of your body. It’s the only place you have to live.”
Lifestyle is an important indicator of health.
In the United States, cigarette smoking is linked to about 80% to 90% of lung cancer deaths.
On the other hand, fast food consumption was found to cause metabolic diseases.
I can go on with research findings. Bottomline is, increasing chronic diseases are associated with the lifestyles of people.
Some of these lifestyle-related chronic diseases are cardiovascular disease, metabolic syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and some kinds of cancer.
Is lifestyle the best medicine?
“The best doctor gives the least medicines.” - Benjamin Franklin
The best medicine is not a pill. Instead, the best medicine is prevention. Prevention can be achieved by living a healthy lifestyle.
As advocates of lifestyle medicine, the Blue Zone Health team treats and manages disease using lifestyle interventions such as community involvement, proper nutrition, stress management, increase in aerobic activity, decrease in use of unhealthy substances (i.e. smoking, alcohol), getting enough sleep and maintaining healthy relationships.
When we make better choices in our lifestyle and health, most chronic diseases are preventable.
Is lifestyle medicine the best medicine for you? If you want to prevent, reverse or manage your chronic illness and live a better life, then we’d say YES.
Explore lifestyle medicine and how it can help you.
Find out more about the difference between conventional medicine and lifestyle medicine.
References:
https://www.cdc.gov/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/
http://lifestylemedicine.org
