A Personal Plan That’s right for you
A customized plan for a new beginning
Your plan starts with your challenges and is designed based on your personal goals. It sets out the steps of a realistic and achievable pathway to optimal health including the support needed to put it in place. Your plan is a living document that will evolve as your life circumstances change and your health develops to new levels. As new challenges arise new strategies and new goals are required.
Defining your values and understanding your habits
Live a values driven life and shape your daily habits to achieve your health goals
Every day we face choices. Our actions in the face of these choices determine our future health. Acceptance commitment training helps to define our values and give us the skills to live fully by making values informed choices. Challenges are overcome more easily as we learn to act in ways that move us in a direction of optimal health.
Habits determine our fate. We must identify our habits and learn how to change unhelpful habits into reflexive positive habits that will shape who we are and give us the health we deserve.
You are what you eat
Shaping your eating habits will determine your future health
We live in a sea of unhealthy food. We are surrounded by contradictory health messages often on processed food labels and tempted by carefully manufactured edible food-like-substances at every turn. Sometimes we have bad genes that make us more prone to the deleterious effects of these unhealthy foods and have to work harder to make the best choices.
Your plan will give you a template and skills to develop a way of eating that will optimize your healthspan and allow you to get older without gaining weight, increasing cholesterol and blood pressure and other common ailments. Programs developed to reverse cardiovascular and metabolic diseases can provide inspiration. Weight, cholesterol and blood pressure are not destined to rise with age. In fact, your genes are not your destined, as Dr. Dean Ornish describes.
Key is the support over time to put in place new habits in the face of personal preferences and skills and social realities. Michael will work with you to put in place special strategies to overcome your hurdles and eat in a way that will give you the health you deserve. Intermittent fasting, time restricting eating may be part of your plan, while a custom Fasting Mimicking Diet menu can supercharge your health.
Fitness is key to healthspan
Finding fun in fitness
Being fit alone doesn’t make you healthy but you must be fit to be healthy and optimize your healthspan. Modern life works against your efforts to be active. The default is to spend a lot of time sitting at work and in your car. Your plan is based on your interests and abilities. Hiking in the forest with friends and tending a garden are great ways to get started.
As you pass forty you need to use your muscles to prevent age related muscle loss. Resistance training comes in many forms and can be shaped to your ability and preferences. Resistance bands and kettlebell sessions can be done at home if you don’t like the idea of a gym. Simple exercises using body weight alone can be all you need. The challenge is to make it a habit.
Cardio-respiratory fitness is essential to maintain healthspan and to keep doing all the things you love to do as you get older. While a walking routine can make the difference, those who want to take it to the next level can consider high intensity interval training. There are so many ways to keep moving: jogging, running, swimming, cycling…..It all comes down to your daily habits.
Do you need a stress management toolbox?
Keeping calm in the face of challenges
Some people have a constitution that makes them impervious to stress. But most of us will feel the effects of stressful life periods at least occasionally. When a stressful period of life hits, you need a stress reduction tool box. This will increase your resilience and get you through the hard times we will all face at one time or another. Building your toolbox before a major stressful event is key.
Meditation, moving forms of meditation such as Qi Gong and Tai Chi, or simply daily prayer are ways to calm the mind and body, lower blood pressure, improve sleep and immunity. What skills do you have that you want to build on? Let’s make practising these skills a habit and help improve your sleep and optimize your blood pressure!
