Health: More Than Just Bananas And Treadmills

This lifestyle medicine I speak of requires a dosage beyond compare, one that allows us to reap the long-term benefits closely associated with our domestic and global centenarian populations: happiness, health and longevity. The dosage, in reference, isn’t right, perfect, or flawless. It does not align perfectly with any normal distribution or get solved through a mathematical equation. The dosage speaks less about fads and fictions and, rather, speaks volumes about bliss, enjoyment, and fun. These elements are sprinkled into each one of our actions so that lifestyle medicine becomes more like a rhythmic ribbon flowing steadily and easily into daily existence rather than a chore buried into our next day’s workload. This dosage is not about frequency, intensity, or time but rather self-satisfaction, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and fulfillment.

Although fun may be reserved for toddlers just coming to grips with plated food (to be thrown around the house) or a repeated annual celebration of one’s 21st birthday, how can we not find enjoyment in medicine that adds years to our life and life to our years? A drudgery of actions molded into existence by behaviors classified as the norm. Pushing and pulling through discomfort, distaste, dislike, anguish, and disdain to reap results for which we never enjoyed the ride getting to. Lifestyle medicine is built on the constructs of optimizing the life in our years and years in our life with solutions that please the palate, provide purpose for our movement, create open space for our thoughts and conversations, and enjoyment in our days. These unrestricted solutions have no intent of a love-hate relationship (unless it keeps you from an early retirement!) but rather a blissful diversion from the norm to which has been superseded. It is this fun, blended up to your liking, shimmying in one direction or another, that can showcase the joys a proper dosage can bring.

As Henry David Thoreau once said, “The world is but a canvas to our imagination”. Utilize your canvas to define lifestyle medicine solutions that allow you to love foods that nourish, movements that provide purpose and actions that fill you with a sense of wonder, adventure and excitement (sweatband not included!)