If Lifestyle Is Medicine, You Might Need a Coach
“Let food by thy medicine and medicine be thy food.”
—Hippocrates
There is no doubt that what we eat is medicine. What you choose to eat has a profound effect on your health. The vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, polyphenols, omega 3 fatty acids, and amino acids from whole nutritious foods are key for optimal body functioning.
Ayurveda, the sister science to yoga, believes that the appropriate food, eaten correctly, nourishes the body, mind, and spirit. In Ayurveda, every food can be considered medicine, neutral, or poison, depending on how it affects our digestive capacity.
We can take this same concept into one’s entire lifestyle. In other words, “Let lifestyle be thy medicine and medicine be thy lifestyle.”
Lifestyle is the way in which a person lives, and thus includes the choices one makes to support that lifestyle. In fact, yoga and Ayurveda, are all about lifestyle. To be a “Yogi” is to live a yogic lifestyle.
If lifestyle is medicine, then the ancient yogis had it right. They laid down a path, a disciplined path at that, for a way to live that would promote ultimate, physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
Healing doesn’t just come from eating broccoli, exercising, and meditating. Health comes from a synergistic effect of the choices we make in how we live our lives.
There is not one right way. Yoga could be one’s choice of a “medicinal” lifestyle or it could not. However, the brilliance in the components that it includes are not to be denied. Its principles can be brought forth to living a lifestyle that supports your overall health and wellness.
Ayurveda Explained
Ayurveda translates to the “science of life.” It is a system meant to nourish the body and mind. It focuses on preventing disease as much as healing an illness and has a holistic approach to health where mind, body, and spirit are interrelated. Nothing is separate and all is interconnected.
This medical tradition states that each person's path toward optimal health is unique because each person is unique. Once you understand your particular mind-body constitution, you can begin to see any underlying causes of imbalance.
Once identified, sometimes simple changes in the foods we eat, or our daily habits can alleviate these imbalances. Not all are easily or quickly fixed but it's surprising what can happen when you start on the path to balance.
The key is to understand your state of health, physical attributes, and your lifestyle practices. Then understanding the root causes of imbalance can lead you on the path to wellness. Routines for wholesome living are recommended. These recommended daily activities or routines that promote self-care are called Dinacharya.
The simple suggestions are to:
Rise before the sun rises, preferably before 6 a.m.
Wash your face, eyes and scrape your tongue.
Cleanse your sinuses; use a neti pot as needed.
Massage your body with oil
Exercise by practicing yoga
Do Pranayama (breath practices) & Meditate
Take a shower or bath
Eat breakfast, balanced for your constitution
Work
Eat your largest meal of the day at midday; make it balanced and mostly plants.
Have a light dinner at least three hours before bedtime
Go for a walk after dinner
Go to bed before 10 p.m.
As you can see the recommendations are so simple. The routine is morning heavy, but the reminder is to go to bed at a reasonable time. Sleep eight hours. Wake up early. Exercise. Start your day with meditation and calm the mind. Eat three meals with lunch being your biggest meal. This is a lifestyle prescription. Ayurveda may have been one of the first lifestyle medicine practices.
Lifestyle Medicine
According to the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, “Lifestyle Medicine is the use of evidence-based lifestyle therapeutic intervention—including a whole-food, plant-predominant eating pattern, regular physical activity, restorative sleep, stress management, avoidance of risky substances and positive social connection—as a primary modality, delivered by clinicians trained and certified in this specialty, to prevent, treat and often reverse chronic disease.” ‘
Can you imagine the amount of money that would be saved if doctors wrote lifestyle prescriptions that needed to be fulfilled?
It is estimated that 80% or more of all health care spending in the U.S. is tied to the treatment of conditions rooted in unhealthy lifestyle choices. Multiple types of cancer, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, and obesity are among the most common and costly of all health conditions that are preventable by lifestyle choices.
Whether we call it functional medicine, lifestyle medicine, or ayurvedic medicine, they all address the root causes of disease by focusing on the lifestyle choices that give rise to these diseases. An adjustment to one’s lifestyle, can prevent, treat, and even reverse these conditions.
It is not uncommon for doctors to suggest that patients exercise more, eat better, stop smoking, reduce stress, and even to get some social support. Sorry to say, they might as well be saying, “Good luck with that. I’m sure you’ll figure it out. See you next year.”
Most likely, they are simultaneously writing a prescription for insulin or metformin or whatever. I’m not suggesting that the prescription is not necessary or helpful, but I am suggesting how easy that prescription is to write compared to one prompting patients to exercise and reduce your stress.
You can easily pick that first prescription up at the pharmacy and have it covered by insurance. With a simple prescription, you get the meds and the treatment at the same time. It’s built into clinical care. Of course, you do have to actually take the medication.
Conversely, if you get a behavioral prescription that gets to the root cause of your disease, there is no actual delivery system for it. Most people want to live in a better state of health but don’t know how to pursue it.
What if a doctor could write a behavioral prescription that went directly to a wellness coach instead? What if lifestyle behavioral coaching was built into clinical care just like your neighborhood pharmacy?
Picture getting a prescription to work with a coach individually or with a group to meet the goals that your doctor laid out for you before that next doctor visit. You might be prescribed physical activity, stress reduction, healthy meals, and social support. This could not only change the fiscal burden on health care but could have a profound effect on one’s overall well-being.
Yoga’s Sister Science
Humans are meant to flourish but it’s hard to focus on things like positive emotions, meaning, and engagement when we are in ill health.
This brings us back to Ayurveda. As the sister science to yoga, it was designed to keep you healthy so that you can go deeper into yoga and spiritual pursuits.
This lines up with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as well. Physiological and safety needs must be met before one can self-actualize.
Aristotle emphasized a life based on eudaemonia, or human flourishing. This requires not only health and wellness but developing the excellences of being human.
To truly experience a life of eudaimonia, one can’t ignore any aspect of wellness be it physical, emotional, social, or intellectual. This means the choices we make and the lifestyle we lead can have a profound effect on our overall happiness and wellbeing.
A diet rich in vegetables is one of the ways to change up your routine for the better.
Improving Your Daily Routine
If the way we live our life has the potential to heal us, plus be a major source in our ability to thrive as humans, then improving our daily routines (dinacharya), must be emphasized and cultivated.
Sometimes we make choices based on poor information, but more often than not we make choices out of habit or for instant gratification. We can’t always rely on what our minds tell us, as we repeatedly do the exact opposite of what will make our lives better.
We need more than knowledge and understanding of what to do. We need more than willpower because willpower fatigues.
We need help on implementation and maintenance. This requires a change in how we do things.
Having a health and wellness coach is the missing link. Similarly, with the help of ayurvedic practitioner, one learns to see the connections between seemingly unrelated conditions and the underlying causes of imbalance. A health coach can do the same.
Shifting the Paradigm
We need a paradigm shift to integrate lifestyle medicine into clinical practice in the areas of food, nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction.
What if there was a lifestyle medicine clinic within a health care organization?
What if health and wellness coaches were part of the structure to help fulfill lifestyle medicine prescriptions?
Instead of a pharmacist filling medicinal prescriptions and talking you through the proper methods of administration and possible side effects, a coach would work with you on your lifestyle prescription and talk you through the ups and downs and possible “side effects.”
Changing medicine to a culture that teaches lifestyle empowers patients to take control of their own health.
More importantly, this paradigm shift includes the fact that doctors, or any health practitioners, insurance providers, and governmental agencies would acknowledge that the way to stop and reverse these the diseases in which we have identified the root causes, is through lifestyle behavior change and using lifestyle as medicine.
Ayurvedic medicine understood this long ago. All Ayurvedic programs are designed with the intention to create within your body and mind an optimum environment for healing to take place and to maximize your body's ability to heal itself.
As our modern-day healthcare realizes this truth, we can appreciate the important role that a coach play.
A Modern Day Dinacharya
Take care of your gut and eat well.
According to Ayurveda, the root cause of all disease is “poorly digested” food. In addition, Hippocrates is also known to have stated that “All disease begins in the gut.”
Modern science has supported this as well. Your gut produces ¾ of your neurotransmitters and contains more than 60 percent of your immune tissue. The health of one’s microbiome plays a critical role in regulating not only the gastrointestinal homeostasis but has also been linked to the instigation of systemic inflammation, and higher emotional and cognitive functions.
Feeding your microbiome is imperative. A diet rich in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits is a healthier option than eating a lot of simple carbohydrates found in processed foods. Eat nuts and seeds, low-starch beans and legumes, and some high-quality meat, poultry, and fish.
As Michael Pollan states, “Eat whole foods, not too much, mostly plants.” Stay away from anything with a label and eat a very colorful diet rich in polyphenols.
Find a stress release
Breathe. Breath is intimately connected with mind and the nervous system, thus when we begin to control the breath, we calm the body and mind. Breathing deeply to expand the ribcage and abdomen, along with breathing through the nose is more efficient and effective at tamping down the sympathetic nervous system. When you inhale, the heart rate speeds up, when you exhale it slows down. When you lengthen your exhales, you signal the vagus nerve which triggers the parasympathetic nervous system, responsible for the “rest & digest” responses in the body. So learning to slow the breath and double the length of the exhale in a moment of distress, will slow the system down, allow you to pause, and will have a profound effect on how you feel and respond.
Do Yoga. When you do yoga, you initiate a process that turns off the fight or flight response and turns on the relaxation response. The deep breathing, the stretching, the movements that release muscle tension, the focus on being present in your body and getting out of your head, have a dramatic effect on the body. Sometimes it is hard to pinpoint why yoga feels so good, but it has a lot to do with the way you feel when the heartbeat slows, respiration decreases, and blood pressure decreases. Enjoy the savasana (corpse pose), the final relaxation pose!
Learn to Meditate. There are many ways meditation can help and many types of meditation. The beauty of all meditation is that it grounds you in the present moment. When our minds are ruminating over the past or anxiously worrying about the future, we become stressed and anxious. Any type of meditation, that brings you to presence has a calming effect, whether it be mantra-based, breath-based, or sound-based, it can be profound.
Practice Mindfulness. This especially helpful because when you learn to create space between yourself and what you are experiencing, your anxiety can soften. Mindfulness can be a seated practice but it can also be practiced in daily life. With Mindfulness we learn to stay with whatever is happening in the mind and body, with kindness and curiosity, whether it is pleasant or unpleasant. This trains you to stay with difficult feelings without analyzing, suppressing, or encouraging them. When you allow yourself to feel, acknowledge, and name your worries or any other difficult thoughts and emotions, this helps them dissipate. This allows you to create space around your anxieties, so that they do not consume you. In effect, by turning toward your anxious thoughts, rather than away from them, or trying to fight them, you gain insight into what is driving them. With practice, you begin to realize that you are not your thoughts and you do not have to believe them. The more curious you can be, the more open and receptive to change you will be. You might not be able to alter the situation, but now you have the space to make a choice as to how you respond.
Start a Gratitude Journal. Research shows that those who practice gratitude—whether through reflection, writing, or in everyday life—report higher levels of positive emotions and a stronger sense of connection. Plus, they also have stronger immune systems, lower blood pressure, and experience less feelings of loneliness. When you are feeling grateful, it's difficult to have an opposite emotion. Try being anxious and grateful at the same time; it just doesn't work! Write three things you are grateful for on a weekly or daily basis.
Move Your Body
Movement is good for your heart and muscles, but it also eats anxiety! Physical movement can stifle the buildup of stress. It deepens the breathing and can relieve muscle tension. It may help you sleep better.
Prioritize Sleep
Ancient Ayurvedic practitioners were truly ahead of their time when they emphasized the importance of sleep. According to Ayurvedic theory, sleep between 10 pm and 2 am is most beneficial for your nervous system and the time your body rids itself of more harmful toxins. The National Sleep Foundation recommends that healthy adults get 7-9 hours of sleep a night. According to the book, Why We Sleep, by neuroscientist and sleep expert Dr. Matthew Walker, sleep affects all aspects of our physical, mental, and emotional health, including our creativity and longevity. Insufficient sleep reduces our learning, memory, and cognitive abilities, causes brain impairment, and increases the risks of numerous diseases from cancer to diabetes, coronary heart diseases and even death
Be Social
We are social beings, and we benefit from the support of close relationships with family and friends. The emotional support you receive can help sustain you at times of chronic stress. Never underestimate the power of friends and community to savor the good times and to get you through troubled times.
Get out in Nature
Put down your smart phone and get outside. Studies have shown that time in nature is an antidote to stress and that we are physically and mentally healthier when we are interacting with nature. It can lower blood pressure, muscle tension, and stress hormone levels. In effect, it turns on the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing anxiety and improving mood.
Consider Supplements
Taking a good multivitamin with minerals that are two- to three-times the recommended daily intake for most nutrients, especially the B vitamins, can help boost your energy. A good probiotic can support your immune system and that gut-brain axis. There are some supplements that can help reset the parasympathetic nervous system and support adrenal function. Ashwagandha, Rhodiola, and Magnolia are all adaptogenic herbs that help support the body’s physiological response to stress and anxiety. L-Theanine, found in green tea, has a calming effect while simultaneously improving alertness.
If you want to learn more about our heath coaching programs, please reach me at sharyn@truenorthwell.com. I’ll be glad to help you.