Making Lifestyle Changes | Research outcomes repeatedly show that Lifestyle Therapy is number one for hyper-wellness and the best treatment for lifestyle related diseases like obesity, type II diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.
Engineer-Psychologist Duncan Riach, Ph.D. in his article, “You don’t need therapy, You need lifestyle” talks about how exercise and stress reduction can cure depression and anxiety, and that he refuses to see any patient that isn’t exercising and meditating to reduce stress daily.
What is Lifestyle Therapy | Read Part 1 if you haven’t already.
The book Lifestyle Medicine discusses lifestyle therapy as medicine for obesity and successful sustained, healthy weight maintenance. In addition to depression, and obesity, multiple research articles also reference strong positive outcomes using lifestyle therapy for treating cardiovascular disease, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, and type II diabetes.
This is all really important and great, but unless you read the research and understand all the medical jargon, the medical industry has failed because you still would have no idea what exactly “lifestyle therapy” is.
Lifestyle therapy is made up of three simple, yet powerful components that when combined together, create incredible health results.
These components are often taken for granted because we recognize them individually, but that’s where we make a mistake. The components of exercise, nutrition and stress reduction are intricately linked together and when we separate them, we only get a fraction of the results.
How many times has your doctor told you that you need to get a gym membership or exercise? How did that work for you? Typically not very well.
The reality is gyms make decent money on memberships that are never used, and your best efforts can be ruined in the kitchen or completely de-railed by stress.
Your doctor is not an expert on exercise unless he is a physical therapist. If he is a physical therapist, he is not a nutritionist, nor an expert in stress reduction. Nevertheless, if you did need physical therapy your insurance would typically limit you to five to eight physical therapy visits for acute care for a specific problem and not the global issue that’s causing or contributing to it.
This is very different from lifestyle, and even limits the support provide for exercise. If you did go to they gym and work out, or even hired a personal trainer, while it did not fix everything, it was a great start and I guarantee it helped.
What we eat and how much stress we are under affects our physical activity performance, energy levels, and ability to recover. It affects our energy levels, joint stability, blood pressure and nearly every aspect of our health.
Your doctor may have also told you that you need to eat healthy, and/or manage your stress, but what exactly is “eating healthy” and how do you “manage stress”? What is eating healthy for you personally with your specific stress levels and health needs?
The icing on the cake is that when you hear “you need to manage your stress”. This is so vague, it just adds the stress of one more thing to have to do, that you don’t even know how to do, on your already long list of thing you have to do.
Did they give you an actual solution? Did anyone tie in how stress affects your
activity levels and performance or your nutrition needs, and what to do about that?
Your personal trainer likely came closer to helping you understand the food-exercise connection than your physician did, but typically neither the trainer or the doctor effectively addressed the level of your stress.
Lifestyle therapy is not just exercise, or nutrition or stress reduction. It’s and inseparable, synergistic combination of those components. These components are so interdependent that if you separate out any one of them you actually get less than 30% results.
With the best of intentions, as long as insurance doesn’t cover it, and pharmaceutical companies don’t make any money from it, the medical profession isn’t going to be 100 percent clear on exactly what lifestyle therapy is and being unclear, there is no way they can effectively communicate or deliver that to you.
What you deserve to know, is that through Lifestyle Therapy:
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- people get off cholesterol, blood pressure, and type II diabetes medications
- People with depression get happy and start knocking out life goals
- certain cancers can be prevented
- obesity can be beat
- type II diabetics may not only completely reverse diabetes, but improve complications like poor vision by two or more eyeglass prescriptions, prevent amputation, heal their lesions and even eventually get “type II diabetes” removed from their medical chart.
You can continue to have a mediocre life with mediocre energy, continue to progress towards taking medications, prick your fingers for blood tests, get frequent lab work, and pay higher insurance premiums while you watch your body deteriorate if you want to, but you should’t feel like you have to, or that there is no other choice.
You deserve to know Lifestyle Therapy exists and it can make you feel better, it can prevent or reverse many of the today’s top diseases and help you feel happier, healthier and more free than you have in years, or maybe even ever.
The choice is yours, choose wisely.