Learn to change your lifestyle in a sustainable way

Lifestyle medicine

Many of us may be living with a diagnosis of chronic disease. At the moment in Ireland, we see obesity disease, prediabetes/diabetes, heart disease or high blood pressure.

Over the years working as a dietitian, I have become aware of the burden chronic disease can have on you and your quality of life.

If you break a leg or are sick for a short period of time there is always hope that you will recover and the event will become a thing of the past.

With chronic disease, the symptoms and associated issues tend to be lifelong. Often the treatments involve medicines and some encouragement to ‘change your habits or lifestyle’.

This broad instruction is overwhelming to most, as we simply don’t know where to start and are often not given the tools to help us to make sustainable change.

In my practice, I often hear ‘I know what to do, I just can’t seem to do it’.

Making sustainable change is one of the hardest things suffers of chronic disease (or any human for that matter) will find to do in their lives.

You may also feel a loss of control; that your fate lies in the expertise of your health professionals and the effectiveness of the medicines or treatments prescribed for you.

Lifestyle medicine is a term used to describe a more whole person approach to help you manage your disease, give you some control and ownership of the management of your chronic disease and to play a real role in the improvement of your quality of life.

This approach is rooted in evidence-based lifestyle therapeutic approaches that include:

· nutrition

· physical activity

· restorative sleep

· stress management

· avoidance of risky substances

· and positive social connections

Nutritional health

Traditionally our nutrition approach has been to follow diets either prescribed by your healthcare professional or some diet that we may have heard of by word of mouth or read on the internet.

Most diet approaches put us in an ‘all or nothing’ mindframe. We follow it religiously for a few weeks or even months and then we are so exhausted from it, we go completely in the opposite direction.

Diets, especially fad diets (remember the cabbage soup one?) usually contain elimination and restriction - that is to reduce a variety of foods and fluid that are deemed harmful or bad or eliminate a whole food group.

You are to follow this for your life and if you deviate from it, you increasing your burden of disease.

Let’s compare this approach to the current Covid pandemic. Imagine if we were told that we need to continue the current restrictions for the rest of our lives or the Covid will increase in burden again.

It doesn’t sound too sustainable, does it?

Over the next few weeks, I hope to offer you alternatives to the strict diet approach, dietary interventions that are evidenced-based and may be more sustainable for real people as they go about their daily lives.

We will be discussing the benefits of adopting dietary patterns like the Mediterranean diet pattern which offers a rich source of foods and nutrients to help prevent and treat many chronic diseases.

In the meantime if you would like to explore the concept of lifestyle medicine you can download some free resources at www.lifestylemedicine.org/ACLM/Tools_and_Resources/Print_Resources.aspx.

Diarmuid Duggan, BSc Sport & Exercise Science, PgDip in Nutritional Science, PgDip in Dietetics, Ma Cognitive & Behavioural Therapy. Diarmuid is a senior dietician at the Bons Secours Hospital Cork.