Lifestyle Modifications

One of the things I've enjoyed about Family Medicine is that it's really the one area of medicine - aside from perhaps Pediatrics - that can get patients to start living healthy lifestyles before they develop disease. It's not a common occurrence - I've really only had a few patients come in where they were truly in a pre-disease state and could have their risk profiles change with lifestyle modifications - but in a medical system that is still primarily reactive, it's a valued opportunity.

For all our medical advances, nothing beats a healthy lifestyle to ensuring continued well-being. A balanced diet, sufficient exercise, adequate sleep, stress control, elimination of smoking, and moderation of drinking. For most patients, these six habits will do more to provide a long, happy life than anything any physician can provide.

These interactions have also been a great reminder to put the emphasis on my own health. Over the past two years, my health habits have fallen to pieces. I went from getting regular high-intensity exercise to getting virtually none. My diet went from reasonable-to-good to consisting of a lot of sugar-heavy foods. I started getting less and less sleep, of poorer and poorer quality (call and 5:30 am shifts didn't help much with this). Stress was naturally through the roof during clerkship. On the plus side, I fortunately didn't start smoking and my drinking stayed fairly moderate, so we'll count those as wins.

As I move out of the craziness of clerkship and onto the regular craziness of what will hopefully be the rest of my life, I'm trying to get some of those healthy habits back. I got a FitBit recently as a present and it's proved to be pretty good motivation (even though research shows it might be detrimental, at least to weight loss). I'm trying to push my daily steps a bit higher and I've started running again. On the sleep front, I'm now more aware of what helps me sleep soundly and what doesn't, thanks for FitBit's helpful - albeit somewhat unreliable - sleep tracker. It's also making me chart what I eat, which if nothing else is making me a bit more mindful of what goes in my stomach. It's led to some specific changes - since I was a kid, I'd have a glass of juice in the morning with breakfast. Every morning. While it gets presented as a healthy serving of fruit, juice is pretty much pure sugar with very little nutrition. I'm drinking tea now instead - never was a coffee drinker - and appreciating the change. Cutting it out eliminates a fair number of empty calories and tons of sugar from my diet.

I never want to be that hypocritical doctor lecturing my patients about good health when I'm not willing to make those changes myself. If only to understand the difficulty that can go along with making these positive lifestyle changes, I'm finding these new efforts worthwhile - and hopefully my own health improves as a result!