A healthy lifestyle can help us live longer and healthier lives, aiding in the prevention, treatment, and even regression of chronic conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, and more [1].
In this article, we will discover the most important factors for taking control of our health through our lifestyle.
Your Health Can’t Wait: Change Your Lifestyle today
For many people, taking care of their health means seeking treatment when they are sick.
But the right time to take care of our health is not just when we are sick. It’s always: both when we are sick and when we are healthy.
The right time is every day, through a healthy lifestyle and diet.
Often, people suddenly change their habits following an illness: a heart attack, a stroke, or cancer suddenly push us to make drastic, often very difficult to sustain, changes in our lifestyle and diet.
Rather than waiting to find ourselves in such a situation to improve our habits, it is better to make small, gradual changes every day that, step by step, can improve our lifestyle and address the very causes that make us sick or keep us healthy.
Address the Root Causes of Health with a Correct Lifestyle
“Before healing someone, ask him if he is willing to give up the things that made him sick.” – Hippocrates
If you are about to crash into a wall with your car, the most important thing to do is to take your foot off the accelerator. Only then should you brake.
If you have a health problem and limit yourself to treating the symptoms, it’s as if you were pressing the brake pedal without first taking your foot off the accelerator.
Many chronic diseases originate from our lifestyle, from our daily habits. They are linked to diet, lack of physical activity, stress, poor quality sleep, lack of positive and natural social connections, and exposure to or use of harmful substances such as smoking and alcohol.
If you continue to do the things you have always done, your state of health will remain what it has always been.
In addition to braking, you must take your foot off the accelerator.
If you have high blood pressure, high blood sugar, or high cholesterol, or if you are overweight, in addition to taking medication (braking), you must act on the habits that caused the problem (taking your foot off the accelerator).
The two things are not mutually exclusive but must act in a coordinated way.
Put Your Body in a Condition to Heal with Your Lifestyle
You have most likely cut yourself or suffered a bruise after a fall. You will therefore have experienced one of the miracles that we have before our eyes every day: our body’s ability to heal.
The wound slowly shrank until it was gone, and so did the bruise. You kept the wound dry and clean, avoided touching the bruise, and after a while, both the wound and the bruise were healed.
Similarly, when you had a cold or flu, even if the medications helped you feel better, you actually healed because you rested, stayed warm, and drank plenty of fluids. In practice, you put your body in a position to heal.
When you follow the pillars of Lifestyle Medicine, you live your life every day in the best conditions for your health, both when you are well and when you are sick.
A balanced diet, regular physical activity, stress management, quality sleep, positive social connections, and avoiding harmful substances will help you prevent and treat many diseases and keep you healthy.
Learn to Row Against the Current
Adopting these healthy habits, however, is not easy. In fact, the environment in which we live is continuously working against us. We live in a world that pushes us to adopt an unnatural and dangerous lifestyle for our health.
We move little, we are stressed, we do not sleep enough, we have difficulty having natural relationships with others, perhaps we smoke or allow ourselves a few too many drinks and, almost always, we are surrounded by food produced by industry that benefits the finances of those who produce it but harms our health.
In fact, food companies profit from the sale of foods that are harmful to health by promoting wrong eating behaviors.
In the United States alone, food companies produce and, therefore, push us to consume about 4000 calories of food per day per person, when the need of an average person is around 2000. [2]
This means that, to achieve their sales goals, these companies actively work to make us eat twice the calories we need.
Their priority is profit, not our health.
Therefore, understanding the dangers of processed foods is crucial for self-defense. In essence, we must learn to go against the grain. We must forge our own path, not the one followed by the majority, but the one that best serves our health.
Take the Helm of Your Health: Download the Infographic!
Ready to steer your health towards a better future?
This infographic is your practical reminder to navigate towards a healthier lifestyle.
Click on the image to download it and keep it handy.
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Read in Italian: Prendi il controllo della tua salute con lo stile di vita
References
[1] Lifestyle Medicine | Wikipedia
[2] U.S. Food System Factsheet | Center for sustainable systems, University of Michigan
