The Four Pillars of Health

Дата публікації допису: Oct 19, 2014 6:27:51 PM

There are many things that impact our health. But from a practical standpoint these are the ones that I consider the Four Pillars of Health: Nutrition, Exercise, Recovery/Sleep and Mind Mastery Work. Often these are the quickest and easiest to change and in doing that we can have a very profound effect on the one's level of health, probably bigger than you can imagine possible before hand.

At the same time, in my experience these four pillars are also the most neglected. For some strange reasons people prefer to invest their time an resources into trying to find some miracle solutions ('snake oils'). One possible explanation for that is that many people, unfortunately, do not seem to have a good understanding of the health determinants (often not even being aware of that, which makes it much harder to work with them because they already 'know everything').

On a surface it seems so obvious and natural and we often do not pay attention to what we do: just eat, move, sleep and be. Who can not do that? But it turns out that we often get entrenched into some pretty destructive habits without even knowing the true dangers of our behaviours. Part of the problem is that we are constantly bombarded by streams of information from all the sides often by people who just try to sell us their products and services, regardless if they work or not.

As I have learned in over 25 years of studying different aspects of health and medicine, these 'common sense' approaches in health are often misleading and it is not surprising to me that being unhealthy is a new norm in our society.

Becoming healthy is not as easy as we like to think. In my experience it can take a lot of time to make meaningful changes in our lifestyles, even if that looks simple.

The purpose of this website is to give you an alternative view to many 'common sense' approaches that do not work in real life. There is a huge degree of misinformation deeply engraved in our common mind. Let me give you an example: many people would consider almonds to be a very healthy food and a good source of protein. In reality, although almonds do have some protein (about 13% of their caloric value, as much as for example oats do), the majority of almond calories comes from fat (74%). Because of its very high fat content I would not consider it to be a 'healthy food' for the majority of people, but marketing push continues doing its job of misinformation. At the same time, beans, have almost twice the amount of protein per calorie (and significantly less fat), but for some reason it is not a widely promoted health food.

This was just one small example to illustrate the problem with misinformation that we are facing. As we go along I hope to show you many other of these 'little' misconceptions and the huge effect they can have on our health and wellbeing. But keep in mind that learning requires two things: time and open mind. So, if you give me some of your time and an open mind I will work with you to help you to build a truly holistic understanding of health, that will help you to get through some big challenges of your life. Be prepared that you will have to implement a lot of 'small' changes in your life, and it will take time (and effort) but eventually it will have a dramatic positive and long lasting effect on your health and wellbeing.