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The Pillars of Health

caramerak

Updated: May 21, 2024


The pillars of wellness - Eat, Sleep, Move, Think, and Connect - are crucial for optimal physical and mental health, and also play a key role in aging well. While there's no one-size-fits-all approach to applying these principles, but here's the basics of things you can have control over to help your body and mind restore balance.

 

1. Eat: Nourish your body and mind


What and when we eat provides essential information for our cells, bodies, and brains.

However, it's not just about what you're eating, but also what your body can do with what you're eating. Not all foods will be right for your body right now. However, some common dietary themes to promote effective growth, metabolism and repair include eating the rainbow, as each color of fruits and veggies offers different health benefits. Incorporate a variety of whole foods to maximize the benefits that each food has to offer, avoid processed foods, sugar, and trans fats, and add lots of fiber. Don't forget to stay hydrated, as feeling thirsty often means you're already dehydrated.


2. Sleep: Restore and heal


Sleep is essential for overall health, requiring both sufficient duration and quality. Aim for 7-9 hours per night, with a consistent bedtime before 11 pm and wake time. This ensures you experience the restorative deep, slow-wave, non-REM sleep, crucial for healing, repair, and detoxification. Missing this phase by sleeping late can lead to numerous consequences. This is a big topic, and often one that isn't taken as seriously as it should. Prioritizing sleep is a non-negotiable in my book.


3. Move: Energize and strengthen


Exercise offers countless health benefits, such as boosting mitochondrial health, essential for cellular energy production. It also improves mood, cognition, muscle strength, bone

health, sleep, and cardiovascular health while reducing chronic disease risk. Strength training, in particular, provides numerous benefits for both physical and mental well-being. While not all exercise is equal, engaging in any activity is better than none. Make it fun! Exercise should be a part of your life you enjoy. If you don't like exercise in the traditional sense, get outside and play. Take up a sport. Go for a walk with a weighted backpack (it's called rucking, and I've recently become a big fan). Find something you like to do so you will do it. If you don't make time for exercise, you'll lose the ability to do it at all. Then, many areas of our life suffer.


4. Think: Cultivate a positive mindset


Your mindset, or the way you think and perceive the world, significantly impacts your physical health. The way you think impacts your stress response, or the way your body reacts to stressors, both internal and external, your immune function, your digestive system and how you can absorb nutrients, your sleep, your inflammation, and more. You can positively influence your physiology by practicing mindfulness, expressing gratitude, engaging in regular physical activity, seeking social support, and challenging negative thought patterns. Remember, if you wouldn't say it to a loved one, you shouldn't say it to yourself.



5. Connect: Foster social connections


Both a sense of purpose and social connections play a vital role in maintaining overall health and well-being, and it's all too often forgotten about in our modern lives. To nurture and maintain these connections, engage in activities that bring people together,

such as joining clubs or organizations, volunteering, participating in sports, or simply making an effort to stay in touch with friends and family.


 

These pillars of wellness provide a solid foundation for a health, but it's important to remember that optimizing these areas means different things for everyone. By working with a functional medicine practitioner, you can uncover the roots of your health concerns and get more specific into what this information means for you. The work is in finding the patterns, knowledgeably swimming upstream from the symptoms you're experiencing, and addressing the "why's" behind the "what's." There's no one-size-fits-all diet, nor one magic prescription for exercise. It takes tuning into your own body, and making sure you can remove the noise so you can understand the signals.

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