For a lifetime of better health, try a philosophy built on nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle behaviors.
Adopting healthier habits can appear overwhelming on the surface, but it doesn’t have to be so daunting. Everybody can attain better health through simple lifestyle changes. Breaking these necessary changes down into simple and integral parts helps to make them less intimidating and more attainable. What it really comes down to is one’s mindset and how health is perceived in the brain.
Many people get caught up in health trends that boast quick and easy effectiveness. This is often associated with some guilt for not having already adopted such a trend into one’s life and not looking like the people touting these trends. While this a useful way to plant a seed of ambition to get healthier, that seed is often stunted by an inability to incorporate change over the long-term. Anybody can lose 20 lbs. and gain it back plus some over the course of three months. In fact, many people do. What needs to be the real trend in health and fitness is consistently living a life that is formed around daily health habits to improve function, vitality, and longevity with the purpose of optimally expressing one’s sense of self.
So, what holds people back from starting and/or succeeding in aligning their daily actions with their long-term health vision? While the solution is multi-faceted, it is simple: a seed of desire. This is a desire for true, long-term change in one’s life. With time and patience, that seed can become a life-giving, behemoth of a tree branching into every aspect of one’s life.
Let’s Break Health Down
The major components of health behavior are those that enable the body, mind, and soul to work cohesively toward a life of vitality, optimal daily function, and longevity. These components of health are nutrition, movement or exercise (fitness), and lifestyle behaviors (e.g., sleep patterns, hydration, stress, relationships, finances, etc.). All of these components are necessary to reach full health potential and true expression of one’s self. Thinking of health as involving all these areas of life often deters people from creating the behavioral changes they need for long-term growth. The knowledge that all of these components—which take time, energy, planning, and discipline—must be considered makes the prospect of health behavior change overwhelming and intimidating. However, this is all a matter of mindset and, actually, once one starts to view health as a marvelous tree with branches in all areas of life, only then can the cohesiveness needed for real change begin.
These components of health must be crafted properly in terms of dosage, appropriateness for the individual, and realistic execution for the people hoping to integrate them. Oftentimes, these components of health are approached incompletely or in isolation of the other through off-the-shelf, quick-fix trends that have it all wrong. There is also a misunderstanding of the people promoting these trends and an idea that ‘if I partake in this trend, I’ll look just like them.’ This is false for two main reasons. First, what works for others might not work for you. We need to be understanding that every body is different. Second, the people representing those ideal pictures of health got that way by consistently practicing healthy behavior over a long period of time. There simply are no quick-fix in health.
So, How Do We Get Started?
Those individuals that you may aspire to look like, those exemplary models of health, got there the same way you can get there: starting at square one. They understand what it takes to make health behaviors align accurately with desired health outcomes over the long-term. They have consistently and constantly practiced these behaviors, and they have done so with a specific goal in mind. The common thread among all of those who achieve their health goals is desire (the seed) followed by an integrated approach to adopting healthy behavior touching on each component of health: nutrition, fitness, lifestyle behavior. While these models of health may use the trends that they sell (or maybe not), this is complementary to an already existing cohesive health and fitness plan. Understanding that the people idolized for health did not get there overnight and don’t rely on quick-fixes can shift your mindset to a more realistic place to start this journey. To start, take ownership of your own health behaviors and start at square one (just as I did) because it is the only way to get those results you seek for the long run.
Your behaviors in one area of life have a direct impact on the outcomes in other areas. They do not effectively change, grow, or improve in isolation since each one relies on the other for full expression. Regardless of what your health goals may be, the best course of action is an appropriate, systematic approach toward moving away from unhealthy behaviors and intentionally moving toward your version of optimal health. A systematic approach includes expertly-informed choices designed around goals and lifestyle, and curated practices designed to fit the unique physiological and social needs of the individual. A health coach can be very beneficial in designing the right individualized approach and provide necessary supports and challenges to take health desire (the seed) and nurture it into the full expression of health (the tree).
Let’s return to this coniferous analogy. Nutrition, fitness, and lifestyle is to the human as sun, water, and carbon dioxide is to the plant. We both need all of them to grow and thrive. For a plant it appears to be easy. All of the necessary inputs are there. The plant does not have to overcome doubts in their head or overwhelming decisions about the best diet options to attain their essential needs for thriving. For humans, this is not the case. There are many thoughts and elements in life that can get in the way of humans making healthy choices, especially in modern society, and it can become increasingly difficult over the course of life to give adequate consideration to all the life-giving elements: nutrition, fitness, lifestyle behavior. Oftentimes, a person will focus on one of them and find that they can’t sustain the effort, falling ‘off the wagon’ part way through the journey toward a healthier more vital self. The most effective philosophy for true health change, and one that STROL Health embodies, is to consider all components of health together, in an integrative fashion that’s both practical and applicable to the life of the individual.
The Three Elements of Health: Nutrition, Fitness, Lifestyle
It’s an unavoidable biological fact that there is a metabolic cost of weight loss. As we lose more weight, the less energy from food we need to sustain the mass of body that remains. Therefore, even though one may eat less, the metabolic cost will eventually catch up and the weight loss will plateau or even reverse. This is what happens when only one element of health is considered. Instead, if one were to include the element of fitness, energetic demands of the body will increase, so that plateau of weight loss hit when just considering diet will be avoided. It is also important to remember important lifestyle elements that benefit our health through social interactions. Being healthy doesn’t have to mean cutting out social drinking or no longer going to restaurants with friends and family. Social connection and relationships are vital to one’s mental health and should not be sacrificed for the sake of clean eating or a gym obsession. This would not be sustainable. A person cannot achieve their picture of desired health or physique by isolating a single health component. A seed cannot evolve into a fruit-bearing tree by only consuming water. It also needs sunlight and CO2. This is just one example to express the complex interplay between all components of health and the importance of a simplified and integrated approach to health improvement.
Most importantly, set yourself up for success. Taking on too many goals is unrealistic. Start slow and work your way up. Many of us know what we need to do to reach our optimal health goal, but we cannot expect to do it all at once. Telling yourself ‘I’m going to cut out sweets, stick to one drink per week, eat salads daily for lunch, go to the gym daily, get to bed by 9:30pm, and cut out red-meat’ all at once is setting yourself up for failure. Also, it’s okay to have moderate amounts of “unhealthy” habits in life for the sake of pleasure. If you and your friends have a weekly ritual of hunting for the best burger in town, maybe cutting out red-meat isn’t right for you. So many people make the mistake of trying to change it all at once right from the start, then fail, then take a six-month break falling back into old habits until the next phase of self-deprecation from poor health choices drives them to try again. Why does this pattern occur and how do we break the cycle?
A seed does not absorb 10,000 gallons of water, 75 years of sunlight exposure, and an equal timeframe of air exposure based on a singular decision that it wants to become a 50-foot tree that provides fresh fruit every spring season. The seed must learn how to survive in the environment, share and spare its resources, hunker down for the winter season, weather terrible storms, avoid strikes of lightning, stand strong in the wind, and so forth. Humans, too, must learn to adjust to the environment, pool and spare their resources (namely time and energy), and overcome challenging seasons of busy schedules, life events, and social demands that makes health seemingly challenging to attain. The truth is, achieving better health is as natural as a seed becoming a tree. We just have to approach it with the right mindset, perspective, and strategy. Rather than turning on the fire hose and trying to douse our seeds of desire for better health with 10,000 gallons of water all at once underneath a billion-watt lightbulb, we have to let the rainfall and sunlight steadily nourish. To reach that desired health outcome, small inputs of nutritional improvement, physical activity, and lifestyle behaviors accumulated steadily over the years as curated habits, fit for the individual, will garner the best results. It takes patient, systematic change. And remember, health practices are built into our lives and not the other way around. Select strategies that meet you at your current state, align with your unique physiological and social needs, and are, therefore, sustainable by design. Don’t be afraid of starting at square one. Shift the mindset and commit to the journey. There is tremendous beauty in the path toward a life full of vitality, functionality, and longevity.
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