Mind the gap…
Overall, we can say that the gap between what your body is evolutionarily developed for and how you actually live your life, decides how much stress you are exposed to.
As a (soon to be) certified functional health coach, my focus is on how you can better adapt your life to your evolutionary legacy. A systematic way to approach this is to make an evaluation of your overall status in relation to these 4 main pillars of health.
4 pillars for good health
- Diet – The quality of what you eat. Do you fill your petrol tank with diesel? Do you get the nutrients your wonderful body needs to do its job? Do you feed the good gut bacteria, or are the bad ones having a party?
- Sleep – 7-9 hours is what we all need… How much do you sleep? And how is the quality of sleep?
- Movement – How much do you move? How varied? How much load? Do you play? How can we imitate the movement patterns of the Stone Age man / woman?
- Stress Management – Do You Consciously Do Stress Management? Have you introduced a stress-reducing practice in your life, such as yoga, meditation, tai-chi or walks in the woods?
Together, these 4 pillars form the basis for a functional health approach to our lives. By looking at ourselves as a whole with an evolutionary legacy, we can more easily figure out where we should take action to get better.
Functional Health
So what is functional health, and how can focusing on FH help you prevent burnout?
One of the pioneers in Functional Medicine and a functional health approach, Chris Kresser defines Functional Health as follows:
“Functional health is a system-based approach where we look for the root causes of chronic disease, instead of just alleviating symptoms and looking for quick fixes. By using a functional health approach, we can better explore and understand the relationship between the body’s various systems, between people and the environment they live in, and between human behavior and how it impacts their health. “
If you go to a functional medicine practitioner instead of a regular medical doctor, you will discover how fundamentally different they work.
The functional medicine approach means that your doctor will focus on identifying and addressing the root causes of your health problems, instead of giving you a pill to improve your symptoms.
A concrete example can be a patient who comes to the doctor with severe eczema. The regular doctor will probably send the person to a dermatologist, who in turn prescribes a strong cortisone cream or similar that reduces the eczema in the short term. A functional medicine doctor will make an examination of root causes, like an examination of gut health, find out if a root cause may be gluten in the diet, milk intolerance, excessive intake of highly inflammatory foods in the diet, etc. Perhaps the doctor would recommend a 30-day reset diet, with gradual reintroduction of foods, in order to eventually find a diet that ensures that gut health improves for good, so that the eczema disappears and does not return.
Where do you stand today?
Here’s what I’m guessing you’re doing, and that is NOT serving you and your body.
- You eat a lot of crappy food, quick fixes for dinner, feel like snacking all the time, and often think you deserve something good (chocolate, chips, candy, etc.), and maybe even every day.
- You drink too much alcohol (need to relax)
- You drink large amounts of coffee to keep going. Trying to not feel so tired and exhausted.
- You sleep too little / too poorly (you are more inefficient and cut back on sleep to try to achieve everything you need, or you sleep poorly because you lie awake at night thinking and worrying)
- You don’t exercise much or nothing (don’t have time, don’t feel like it, too tiret, etc.)
- You exercise too much or too hard (you try to exercise your way out of stress, but don’t listen to your body when it signals that you don’t tolerate the same amount of exercise anymore)
- You walk around feeling chronic and constant stress, and are rarely or never really relaxed anymore. Sometimes you find yourself standing in the middle of the floor, unable to sit down and relax without feeling bad for not doing anything “useful”. You dread opening your e-mail in the morning, and feel your heart jump when the phone rings… especially if it is an unknown number. You get anxious from listening to voicemail.
If this is you, the bad news is that this is going to make you sick sooner or later. Your body is simply not designed to withstand this strain over time. The good news if this is you, is that small changes for the better can make things much better fast!
By implementing some simple principles of functional health, you can help your body instead of fighting against it.
Are you ready to dive into your situation and find out where you stand? Together we can make a plan with the small measures that will quickly give you results in a positive direction, and which are adapted to your unique situation!