plant:life nutrition
unlock your potential
WHAT IS LIFESTYLE MEDICINE?
As a dietitian, nutrition is 'my thing'. But our health and happiness is also affected by other aspects of our lifestyle
As a lifestyle medicine practitioner and guided by your priorities, I will offer you holistic, evidence-based advice around your health and wellbeing. My aim is always to support you to create sustainable lifestyle changes. This can include looking at the following aspects of your lifestyle; the ‘pillars’ of lifestyle medicine:
Mental Wellbeing
Managing stress and learning how to relax are key to sustaining good health and wellbeing. I can support you to find purpose in life and find ways to better connect with nature
Avoiding Risky Substances
This could mean offering you support to stop smoking or reduce overuse of alcohol, or addressing other addictive behaviours such as excessive social media use
Healthy Relationships
Developing and sustaining healthy and meaningful relationships, and increasing social connection, is key to reducing stress and promoting physical and mental health
Healthy Eating
As I said, this is my 'thing'! I can teach you new knowledge and skills that will support you to find a healthier eating pattern that suits you and you are able to sustain long term. Together we will ensure this fits into your budget, life circumstances, and cultural and taste preferences.
Sleep
Achieving good quality sleep is key to feeling vibrant, energetic, and able to cope with the day ahead. To achieve this, good sleep hygiene is needed. This may involve adding in new daily habits or avoiding behaviours that can impair sleep
Physical Activity
I can help you to find ways in which you can incorporate physical activity into your everyday life, as well as reducing the amount of time you spend sitting down. This doesn't just affect your cardiovascular health, but every part of your wellbeing.
All of these pillars interact with and affect each other. For example, feeling stressed can trigger an unhealthy use of alcohol or cause you to sleep badly. Both of these things in turn can lead you to reach for more unhealthy foods the following day, and this can lead you to feel demotivated about taking your planned exercise later that same day. You can see why we need to look at things in this holistic way, and why dealing with diet alone may not be enough.
Just as a doctor may offer you a prescription for a medication, I can offer you bespoke ‘prescriptions’ for each of these pillars – this is another way of saying that we will agree on a simple plan of action for each pillar that will move you towards your ultimate goals. This will, as always, be tailored advice, and it may be that we will initially only focus on 2 or 3 of these pillars which are most relevant to you.
