What is Lifestyle Medicine?

Lifestyle Medicine enables people to take back control and responsibility for their own health and make changes to make the most of what is important to them in order to live a better and longer life.

It allows patients to ask themselves ‘what matters to me, right now and in the future’.

Based around the 6 pillars of Lifestyle Medicine:

Mental Wellbeing

Healthy Relationships

Physical Activity

Healthy Sleep

Healthy Eating

Avoidance of Harmful Substances

It allows change that is long lasting and rooted in science.

Lifestyle Medicine addresses the underlying causes of lifestyle related health problems, acting to prevent and sometimes reverse these problems. It addresses the causes of chronic disease.

People want to make changes to improve their health and in order to make sustainable and meaningful change we need to address the underlying science - the ongoing Metabolic Inflammation (Metaflammation), provide skills such as behaviour change techniques, use tools to assist lifestyle changes and take action to prevent unhealthy behaviours. 

Lifestyle Medicine does not apportion blame for choices made, but supports people to make small achievable changes to improve their own health. Lifestyle choices are sometimes out of a person’s control, but individual support is essential. Changes no matter how small are within your control and we at Never Matched will support you to make these changes.

Enabling Behaviour change is key, at Never Matched we aim to establish rapport, set an agenda on what is to be changed and establish your readiness to make change. We will assess how important it is to you and how confident you are you can make this change (Rollnick, 1999).

Lifestyle Medicine is unique in that it has the ability to tackle the root cause of many of today’s non communicable diseases. By addressing an individual’s own 6 pillars, small changes can be made in each area to reduce ill health and improve longevity. 

Low grade systemic inflammation, driven by todays unhealthy lifestyles, we feel has a huge part to play. The cheap and easily accessible processed foods, inactivity, unhealthy behaviours, sometimes social isolation, poor sleep and poor mental wellbeing have led to inflammatory changes resulting in downstream diseases of Type 2 Diabetes, Cancer, poor mental health and some neurological conditions.

Lifestyle Medicine is needed to improve the quality and quantity of life experienced by the individual. It focusses on the 6 pillars of lifestyle medicine so we can help treat and prevent this global burden of disease. Health systems must adapt to a rapid shift in disease burden from communicable health disease to non-communicable (Lancet, 2019). Lifestyle medicine trains professionals to work on the upstream determinants of non-communicable disease to reduce the number of life years lost due to ill health.

Implementing the six pillars to reduce metabolic inflammation and understanding the socio-economic impact on health, whilst implementing behaviour change is key. Lifestyle Medicine has the ability to reduce the burden of disease globally, with simple small changes in multiple areas to improve both quality and quantity of life whist reducing pressure on healthcare systems, benefitting both the Individual and Society.

The need for Lifestyle Medicine should not be underestimated, we believe it has the potential to change healthcare as we know it.