Sustainable Health Through Lifestyle Medicine

Welcome to my (Carrissa Losantas) blog, where you will find valuable information about sustainable health through lifestyle medicine and health behavior change. Stay tuned for tips, advice, and inspiration on how to improve your well-being.

What is Health?

When we speak of health, we don't only talk about one's physical health. We refer to the overall health of one person, considering his or her mental, emotional, and physical well-being. Health is a spectrum ranging from being free from disease to being diagnosed with a condition to having severe complications. In this blog, we will talk about the different aspects of health and its evidence-based relationship with various lifestyle factors.

What is Lifestyle Medicine?

It is a medical specialty, as defined by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, that uses therapeutic lifestyle interventions as a primary modality to treat chronic conditions including, but not limited to, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. Lifestyle medicine-certified clinicians are trained to apply evidence-based, whole-person, prescriptive lifestyle change to treat and, when used intensively, often reverse such conditions.

Lifestyle medicine is a young branch of medicine that focuses on the pillars of Nutrition, Physical Activity, Sleep, Stress Management, Substance Use, and Positive Social Connections. We focus on Evidence-Based approaches to capture these 6 Pillars, from assessment and diagnosis, to overall management of clients.

How can we now achieve sustainable health?

As a Lifestyle Medicine Physician and Health Coach in training, I always emphasize that health behavior change is a relevant step toward ensuring optimum health throughout one's life. The internet and social media platforms have been plagued with numerous information, and I'm here to make it digestible and to help you apply these to your day-to-day living.

Health is a way of life. We are just human. We all have good days and bad days, sometimes we make good decisions and sometimes we make bad decisions. So long as we commit to bouncing back after every mishap, our overall health will improve, may it be weight-wise, your blood sugar/cholesterol levels, mental health, heart conditions, fertility, etc. etc., etc.

Changing health behaviors + Committing to a better lifestyle = Sustainable Health

What can you do to start committing to yourself?

Ok, so you want to start changing health patterns and improve your overall health. That's a good plan but how do you start? Assess yourself.

Assess yourself in terms of your daily diet or food intake, physical activity, quality of sleep, your stressors and your ability to manage them, current vices or substance use, and the presence or lack of positive social connections. This is where a diary comes in handy, so you can make objective observations. You can finally get to know yourself in terms of health.

You may think that you eat a lot of fruits and vegetables, however, your food diary may tell you otherwise. You can think you drink enough water, but then taking note of it shows that you don't drink as much. You say you are happy with life, but then you end up sleeping less because it's hard for you to initiate sleep.

This is a good place to start. Only then can you plan your next step such as eating more vegetables, subscribing to that healthy diet plan, or starting that gym membership.

It is difficult to incorporate big changes immediately without knowing what needs fixing. Knowing yourself, your strengths and your weaknesses enables you to find out what changes you have to make and which ones you need to focus on. You don't need to do all your plans at once. You can start with simple things, small unhealthy behaviors, one at a time. Then another, then another, and with enough commitment, eventually you can make all those bad habits into healthy behaviors.

I hope this first blog entry helps you to some extent. Tune in for more ways on how to achieve sustainable health. (I'm working out on making newsletters soon) :D