We get asked the question all the time: “Why is nutrition and lifestyle so important?”
Well first off, 85% of your immune system is in your gut. So nutrition, nutrition, nutrition. It’s all at the end of your fork. If you focus on your nutrition, you’re gonna avoid 85% of all long-term health consequences.
If you don’t do nutrition well, you don’t have your lifestyle right. You can’t eat Big Macs, Ho Ho’s, Ding Dongs, and french fries everyday and expect to get well. Those things are disease-causing.
If you get nutrition right, then you get your lifestyle right, and then we fully believe that disease will go away, which is like really awesome! So, we have to stress lifestyle! We have to stress nutrition!
We believe in eating FOOD and avoiding what we call unfoods (or poisonous and inflammatory foods). You do that and things get better.
Where else does chronic disease come from besides just nutrition? Stress. Stress is one of the number one reasons that patients show up in the doctor’s office because they’re stressed out.
Their blood pressure goes up then they start to put on that weight then they end up in the doctor’s office with joint pain, aches, elevated blood pressure, and insomnia. If that’s you, then we surely don’t want to put you on pills. We just need to teach you how to manage your stress.
And then there’s exercise…. We are designed to move. In America today, sitting has become the new smoking. And here comes vascular disease because we sit too much and too long.
All of the components of lifestyle are essentially important, but we absolutely cannot leave out the spiritual and mental pieces of the puzzle either. They all fit together. Someone once told me, “as you think it, so shall you become.”
So the mind (the mental piece), oftentimes is where a lot of things begin. We have to put it all together. From nutrition, to exercise, to stress management, and even what you do with your thoughts. These are all important to your long-term outcome.
Put it all together, you got a really cool, awesome life. We’ve gotta stay focused on that everyday. Now you see how you can avoid long-term health consequences with nutrition and lifestyle.