As part of the series called Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle, let’s now move into part 3, the main idea; your need to reduce stress and manage your energy.
Read Unleash the Full Potential of Your Lifestyle—The Antidote to the Standards American Dream—Part 2
It’s not about diet and lifestyle it’s about our need to reduce stress and manage our energy so we can elevate our health, performance, and longevity.
From a context point of view, we’re talking about achieving what you are up to in the world, as a parent, professional, creative artist or athlete, while living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind.
Which brings up the point of this Insight.
To “unleash the full potential of our lifestyle, we have to default to a new context for “lifestyle.” One starts with knowing how to reduce stress and manage your energy.
The default state of “diet and lifestyle” is a fluffy attempt at talking about the solution to today’s overwhelmed, under-recuperated, overfed and undernourished (sometimes overnourished), super busy, but often physically inactive individual. It’s not only not accurate, it’s not very executable for most people, particularly those who have limited experience in how to deal with dynamics of living today.
You hear “diet and lifestyle” mostly because most health and wellness professionals are nutrition-oriented. But this is not the best way to look at your health and wellness strategy and you don’t want to divorce your idea about health and wellness from your performance in life.
First of all, why is “diet” extracted from the idea of your lifestyle, when the way you eat, is part of your lifestyle. Would we say exercise and lifestyle? Sleep and lifestyle? No, nor would we isolate any other aspect of lifestyle outside of your lifestyle.
Sure we eat multiple times per day and yes, people struggle with the way they eat because of:
- Too much stress
- Not enough energy, or inability to manage their energy
- Poor health that keeps them stuck in vicious-cycle habits
- Eating to stimulate energy, and lose weight, when they should only be eating to nourish
- Food addiction
- Lack of understanding about lifestyle nutrition, (they don’t understand how to eat a whole foods, “nutrient-rich” diet).
- And then the environmental factors, like lack of access, financial wherewithal, etc.
But even still, isolating diet from your lifestyle says two things…
- Diet is the most important.
We agree it’s very important, but assert that it’s not the most important. - What does “lifestyle” really mean? (You can find out here)
Every time you’ve heard “diet and lifestyle” from the past, did you ever really know what was meant by lifestyle? Probably not.
So what is more important than diet and the only idea that could be separated (for communications purposes) from lifestyle?
It’s managing stress and energy.
Stress and energy affect every aspect of your lifestyle and every aspect of your lifestyle is, in fact, a stress and affects your energy. And it’s only through lifestyle management that we can effectively reduce our stress and manage our energy, elevate our health, performance, and longevity.
Note: I can already hear the hypersmart saying “not all stress is bad,” it’s not about how to reduce stress and manage your energy; sometimes you have to increase stress….”Yes, we’ve got that, but for too many of us, we are suffering from too much stress, even the good kinds today and in the new biology, stress is seen in a whole know light. So just go with it.
And to do that, in a lifestyle context; it’s not about sticking to a set or fixed diet or exercise “program,” that is so commonly purveyed in the market and most of us have difficulty sticking to (which is a stress in and of itself); it’s about YOU, having the lifestyle mindset and skillset across all the essential lifestyle skills, including, but not limited to an effective approach to lifestyle nutrition and exercise.
And with those skills, in what’s called a “performance lifestyle,” it’s about knowing what to do, when to do it, why and how, so you do it to reduce stress and manage your energy. And that’s essential to resolve past issues, evolve in the present and get your needs met, at the level they need to be met (as best as is possible) so you can accomplish and achieve your goals and live with a good quality of life in the process.
Yes, it’s a different paradigm than you are probably used to, but it’s reality. And it fulfills on the mission of learning how to live in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind while achieving even your most ambitious goals.
Got the Skills to do that? To reduce stress and manage your energy, elevate your health, performance, and longevity?
No doubt diet is important, but understanding your lifestyle as a whole is more important, and it starts with reducing stress and managing your energy so you can live with optimal energy levels.
