What is Lifestyle Medicine?

Lifestyle Medicine is a medical specialty that uses proven treatments to prevent, treat, and often reverse chronic, lifestyle-related disease.

Per the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 80% of all the health misery in the US is caused by suboptimal lifestyle habits. Standard medical practice in the US uses pills and procedures to treat these lifestyle-related diseases. While this is sometimes appropriate, it only masks the symptoms and doesn’t address the underlying cause of these diseases, allowing them to worsen over time.  

Traditional medical training doesn’t teach our US healthcare professionals how much our lifestyle choices matter in our overall health or how to effectively address these issues with patients. Even if it did, the current medical system is not designed for medical providers to be able to deliver the teaching, coaching, and support needed to help patients make lasting lifestyle change. Hence, the development of a new medical specialty-Lifestyle Medicine. 

The great news about chronic disease brought on by unhealthy behaviors is that it can often be prevented, stopped, and even reversed by adopting healthier habits. That isn’t to say all disease is preventable or fixable by optimizing lifestyle, but we have much more ability than most of us (including doctors) realize. 

Adopting a healthier lifestyle is beneficial for everyone and particularly impactful for the following conditions:

  • Autoimmune Diseases like Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lupus

  • Cancer

  • Cardiovascular Disease

  • Chronic Fatigue

  • Constipation

  • Type 2 Diabetes and Prediabetes

  • Headaches

  • Irritable Bowel Syndrome

  • High Blood Pressure

  • High Cholesterol

  • Overweight and Obesity 

Lifestyle Medicine focuses on six key areas of your daily life to improve your health:

Feet — making time for moderate physical activity

Sleep — getting enough quality rest

Forks — eating whole food, plant-forward meals

Fingers — avoiding activities such as smoking, alcohol, and drug use

Love — having solid relationships and passions in life

Stress — reducing your amount of stress and managing it well

Optimizing your habits in Fingers, Forks, and Feet will give you the most health benefits. That said, making sure that Sleep, Stress, and Love are in good shape is critical to your success in making significant, sustainable improvements. 

Sleep, stress, and love have some independent impact on your health, but being exhausted, super stressed, and not having positive motivators for making behavioral changes will completely sabotage your ability to make progress on Fingers, Forks, and Feet!  Therefore, I recommend you don’t jump directly into working on diet improvements without making sure your Sleep, Stress, and Love are a solid foundation on which to build your Fingers, Forks, and Feet!  I highly recommend that you take my 2-hour online, self-directed Lifestyle Medicine Workshop as a starting point to assess your habits and develop your initial plan. 

What is a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diet?

For most people, the habit where they are the furthest off from optimal is Forks — their diet. The American College of Lifestyle Medicine, after reviewing all the available data on diet and health, recommends that people adopt as close to a 100% whole food, plant-based diet as they are willing and able. A whole food, plant-based diet consists of fruit, vegetables, whole grains, beans, potatoes, and some nuts and seeds. It avoids processed foods (like white flour, sugar, and oil) and animal products (meat, dairy, eggs, and fish). A WFPB diet is:

  • One of the quickest and most effective ways to improve health

  • The only diet proven to prevent and reverse heart disease — our nation’s #1 killer

  • Three times more effective at reducing sugar levels in patients with diabetes than the American Diabetes Association diet

  • The diet most helpful at getting to and maintaining a healthy weight without being hungry

  • The diet shown to increase your body’s ability to fight cancer

The people most likely to live to over 100 years of age get more than 80% of their daily calories from whole plants. The average American, on the other hand, gets only about 7% of his calories from whole plants. No wonder we are drowning in a sea of chronic disease! Whole plants are the foods our bodies are designed (by Mother Nature or by God-however you view how the world works!) not just to survive, but to thrive.  

Adopting a whole food, plant-based diet can be hard.  My first week, I ate brown rice and veggies every night for dinner because I couldn’t think of anything else to make!  Most of us grow up thinking about dinner as 1) What is the meat? 2) How am I going to cook it? 3) What are my sides?  At first, I was thinking “What the heck am I going to be eating…just sides???” There are many ways you can move to a (more) whole food, plant-based diet. Many patients have liked my gradual approach of adjusting breakfasts, then lunches, then dinners, then working on how to make it work when out to eat or at parties. It can be done in one-week increments or you can take longer at any particular stage.

Book a Lifestyle Medicine Telehealth Consultation

Let’s set some goals — and create a path to reaching them.

We’ll start with a medical consultation to assess your lifestyle-related health issues and define goals that fit into your daily schedule. Sustainable lifestyle change happens most effectively when you are in the driver’s seat, so rather than having a one-size-fits-all mentality, we’ll create a customized plan to control how much change you make and how fast you make it.

Our treatment plan will involve continued one-on-one collaboration, with all the additional support and accountability you need for success!

30-minute Appointment: $175

60-minute Appointment: $350