More and more research is showing that the key to lifelong good health is what experts call “lifestyle medicine” — making simple changes in diet, exercise and stress management. To help you turn that knowledge into results, we’ve put together this manageable list of health and wellness action steps.
We asked three experts — a naturopathic physician, a nutritionist, and a personal trainer — to tell us the top five simple-but-significant lifestyle-medicine changes they recommend.
Besides giving you three different takes on how to pick your health battles, this list gives you choices you can make without being whisked off to a reality-show fat farm — or buying a second freezer for those calorie-controlled, pre-portioned frozen meals.
As a yoga teacher and a doctor I get a lot of questions about health. To be honest I think yoga has taught me way more about being healthy, while medicine mostly has my head wrapped around the finer points of disease. That said, the two complement each other amazingly well, and at the end of the day they clearly agree on the basics. Here are the 5 fundamentals of health where eastern and western medicine share common ground, or at least get out of each other’s way!
Exercise. It’s all about sweat. A lot of yoga and exercise teachers shy away from saying you have to actually sweat, but you do. You don’t change your cardiovascular state or your energetic state if your workouts don’t include sweating. You also don’t get the glorious detox that is one of the main benefits of exercise. So find a way to sweat at least 3-4 times a week. Yoga is great, running, or plopping on one of those machines at the gym. For me a good sweat happens in half an hour, I don’t need to chain myself to a stairmaster all day. But once my shirt is sticking and my nose is dripping that is the truest simplest sign that I’ve moved and moving is the one thing our bodies need the most to be healthy.
We asked three experts — a naturopathic physician, a nutritionist, and a personal trainer — to tell us the top five simple-but-significant lifestyle-medicine changes they recommend.
Besides giving you three different takes on how to pick your health battles, this list gives you choices you can make without being whisked off to a reality-show fat farm — or buying a second freezer for those calorie-controlled, pre-portioned frozen meals.
As a yoga teacher and a doctor I get a lot of questions about health. To be honest I think yoga has taught me way more about being healthy, while medicine mostly has my head wrapped around the finer points of disease. That said, the two complement each other amazingly well, and at the end of the day they clearly agree on the basics. Here are the 5 fundamentals of health where eastern and western medicine share common ground, or at least get out of each other’s way!
Exercise. It’s all about sweat. A lot of yoga and exercise teachers shy away from saying you have to actually sweat, but you do. You don’t change your cardiovascular state or your energetic state if your workouts don’t include sweating. You also don’t get the glorious detox that is one of the main benefits of exercise. So find a way to sweat at least 3-4 times a week. Yoga is great, running, or plopping on one of those machines at the gym. For me a good sweat happens in half an hour, I don’t need to chain myself to a stairmaster all day. But once my shirt is sticking and my nose is dripping that is the truest simplest sign that I’ve moved and moving is the one thing our bodies need the most to be healthy.
No comments:
Post a Comment