Imagine this scenario. You decide you want to lose some weight and start eating healthier during the day. But you arrive home at 8:00pm feeling stressed out and exhausted. You order a pizza and sit in front of the TV—forgetting all about the salad and power walk in your plan. Sounds familiar?
Integrative Nutrition is a bridge between nutrition and personal growth and development. Integrative Nutrition takes into account not only the food you eat but also your relationships, physical activity, career, and spirituality to help you reach your health and wellness goals.
As Joshua Rosenthal, the founder and Director of the Institute of Integrative Nutrition, explains, “while food is critically important, it is secondary to the area of primary food—loving our lives, moving our bodies, having meaningful careers, and embracing the things that feed us on a mental, emotional, psychological, and spiritual level.”
Integrative Nutrition offers a solution to the most common health issues and here is why:
It is not about the best diet on the market, it is about the individual. What works for a certain person might not work for another. Maybe the low carb diet worked for your friend but when you tried it you felt restricted and ended up craving more sweets.
It is about finding balance between primary and secondary foods. The nutrition plan might be great but you are not going to be able to follow it if you feel stressed, if you are not getting enough sleep, or if you are unhappy with a certain area of your life.
It takes into account where you are and where you want to be. Maybe for Mary the best she can do is give up the donut she buys every day on her way to work and buy a healthier alternative. But for Linda who already does this, it would mean to prepare some homemade breakfast ahead of time.
It recognizes cravings as a good thing. Cravings mean your body is not in sync with what it needs. Integrative Nutrition reconstructs and seeks to discover the underlying cause of those cravings instead of simply ignoring them and saying “No, you can’t have that!”
It promotes small sustainable changes. It is not about losing 20 pounds in two months or adopting an all or nothing approach but rather in implementing small changes that will help you succeed in the long run.
Life does not stop because you started a new diet. There will always be a dinner, a cocktail party, a holiday season, a stressful day, etc… And in Macau, you know that is going happen and quite often. What really matters is to adopt a healthier lifestyle and discover what works for you.
Have you heard about integrative Nutrition before? Do you think this approach can help you succeed with your health and wellness goals? If you want to know more be sure to check Macau Lifestyle every month for my column, or contact me by email: catarinarodrigues.coach@gmail.com.
