Lifestyle is medicine
Most of the healthcare systems around the world have incentives for making sick people get better. The problem with that is that to measure progress, you need more people to become sick.
How about if there are incentives to prevent people from becoming sick in the first place? Or incentives to improve health better before people become sick?
What I am learning as I dig into this is that lifestyle is medicine. What we eat and drink, how often we move our bodies, and how we take care of our minds, souls, and spirits have a lot to do with keeping us healthy and helping us find healing1.
Nature takes care of itself.
The body can take care of itself if we ingest the right kind of food, we help it rejuvenate and are conscious of harmful things - even when they've become commonplace.
Two of those are sugar and seed oils. Removing these from our diet improves our physical and mental health, and reduces the risk of dying from most food-induced life-threatening illnesses.
Sometimes, most of what we attribute to emotions and stress should instead be attributed to the content of the food we eat - or lack of it. That rash reply. That tired look. The drained energy. The lack of sleep. The toll of depression.
Zoom out a bit and you see how the problem and incentives are wide apart.
The amount of funds that go into advertising unhealthy food and lifestyle is alarmingly high when compared to incentives that are in place for people to eat healthy, take part in an exercise routine, and lead a lifestyle aligned with healthy living.
While you can't stop what companies spend their advertising budgets on, you can work on what you spend your energy budgets and finances on.
Truly, we are all on drugs. But you can curate your food and lifestyle to enhance your health and prevent you from other drugs.
You can create micro-incentives for yourself to eat right, exercise, and lead a healthy lifestyle.
This isn’t medical advice. Speak with your medical personnel before making any health-related decision.