How To Have The Right View Of Health
How you approach health changes what your body does. And what our body does is the most critical element of health.
The first week of the Nourish30 Challenge is upon us, and I'm pretty excited. Of course, I want you to push your body and produce results. The nerdy nutritionist in me also wants to change your view of health.
That means I also need to clarify why I, the nutritionist who fights against “dieting”, decided hosting a challenge was a grand idea.
Isn't that a little hypocritical?
Generally speaking, I am on the anti-diet bandwagon. I've even avoided challenges, but I need to clarify why. It's never because of the diet or the challenge but the motivation behind them.
I'm against the traditional approach to health that can get lumped into any number of health ideas but out of the motivation of reduction.
I'm against the reductionist approach to health.
And yes, this is going to be your motivation for the week!
It's also a good reminder that your motivation (mindset) changes how your body responds (how you think/speak changes your biology).
Health is how your body responds to what you do, not just what you do. How your body responds is often based on the motivation or mindset behind what you do.
If you change your mindset about health—it will change you.
Let's break up with the traditional approach to health and step into a new one. One that expands your life not restricts it.
The wrong approach to health:
The traditional approach to health has come from a reduction point of view.
It makes you believe that health happens when you eliminate certain foods, deprive yourself, micromanage your macros, or give up a number of other things in the name of health because health has been coupled with actions that deprive, starve, restrict, and eliminate.
This view of health is considered a reductionist view. It equates change to restriction. To achieve health, you must give up something. The problem is reduction also tends to:
Make yourself smaller
Make your problems larger
Ignite scarcity and fear
Turn on your stress response
Dysregulate your nervous system
Cause you to conserve, store, and hoard
Anytime you get smaller, the world becomes more threatening.
I know that's not the goal of the health space, but it's what happens when we restrict, deprive, and starve. Your human nature works against what you believe it takes to get healthy. When you are deprived, your body conserves.
Health becomes a fight, and in the process, this makes you more unhealthy.
It makes health your world instead of using health to live.
It's hard to see how dangerous this is until you're in the depths of it, blinded by restriction that you can't see the possibility of expansion.
However, there is another way to approach health. The less common path founded on expansion. It's the opposite of restricting, starving, and depriving, which leads to hoarding, conserving, and storing, and that is adding.
The right approach to health:
It's the idea that health expands your energy and safety. It's an expansion of yourself and not in your waistline, although I can see how we wrap that up into one and the same.
Expansion is the opposite of deprivation. It's doing things because it expands your life. It betters your life.
Expansion works to:
Understand how health can add to your life
You become larger (thus, so does the world)
It's a co-existence with all of life
It ignites your creativity, social centers, and sense of adventure
It makes you feel safe
It's energizing
I like to think of expansion as seeing health in all of you and you in all of life.
It's no longer about just your body, your fat cells, or your hormones. It's how those interact with all of you—mind, body, and soul—to create your life.
The expansion form of health seeks to create more energy, safety, and life. It adds to your life rather than subtracts from it.
I'm not saying there isn't a point when you should remove some things from your life, but even that can be viewed not in what you're losing but what you're gaining by removing.
It's all about the motivation.
As you kick off the 30-day challenge, view it as an expansion of your life. The challenge is created to better your life and your health.
That's the only way to move forward!
In the latest podcast, I discuss this subject and relate it to the challenge—why you need to do hard things.
Your body was designed to do hard things. It thrives in work. It even likes to be stressed, but only when that comes from a place of expansion (to better your life), not out of a threat to life.
My goal with the Nourish30 Challenge is to help you engage with hard things because they better your life. Ultimately, it helps you live more life.
Now, go out there and take action that supports your life. That doesn't mean the easy answer. It means the healthy one.
Cheers to the first week of the challenge! You've got this!
P.S. I'm always here for you. If you're struggling, send me a message! If you have a win, let's celebrate! I love to be part of your journey, so please message me with the good, the hard, the questions and concerns!