Lifestyle is by choice; every individual makes choices throughout life. Whether your choices were good or bad is usually determined by your state of health and well-being. Those who have not always made the healthiest choices during life may need assistance with getting on the right track. Personalized Lifestyle Counseling or PLC is the path on which many have traveled with these expectations. PLC has received nothing but positive feedback over care and compassion that specialists show to their patients (Schulman-Marcus, 2015). This facility focuses on staying away from unhealthy habits like smoking, drinking, or overeating. The topic of PLC was selected due to its supposed ability to change the lives of many Americans. As a professional, I recognize the need for such approaches to health counseling and am interested in popularizing individualized promotion of healthy lifestyles.
Healthy Lifestyles
If you prefer to live healthily, the options within the boundaries of dieting and joining the gym would be the most efficient route to stay on. Therefore, even if there is doubt in your mind, talking to your lifestyle counselor can keep you moving forward toward a healthier lifestyle. Good nutrition and physical activity reduce your risks of developing chronic diseases. According to the Harvard Health Blog, five areas are impacting the risks of premature death: diet, physical activity, weight, smoking, and alcohol intake. When it comes to diet, you need to include plenty of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and whole grains. Also, dedicate thirty minutes to physical activity to maintain healthy body weight. Within your efforts, smoking and consuming large amounts of alcohol are not advised by a personal lifestyle counselor.
Sleep also plays a major part in a person’s life. Therefore, it is recommended to receive at least six to eight hours of sleep every night. If you have irregular sleeping patterns, it can cause stress, fatigue, and affect your memory. Also, you may lack the ability to focus or pay attention to some activities. Major stress is very unhealthy as well and can lead to stomach cancer or, at a conservative estimate, stomach ulcers, which can be very painful. Stress is among the factors associated with the leading causes of death in the U.S.
Apart from sleep, motivation can sometimes become the key to success. Without proper motivation, people can feel as if they are just spinning their wheels but going nowhere. A support team is usually your best motivational choice, and PLC coaches also show how well they care for their patients. Many people prefer personal coaches that are accessible through PLC services. Using such services, you can work with a personally experienced cardiologist ready to assist you at any given time.
Unhealthy Lifestyles
Your PLC couch will explain to you what an unhealthy lifestyle consists of and what kind of habits you may have to give up. For instance, they include the habits of overeating, causing several medical conditions, such as heart attacks. Following these unhealthy strategies is a very common lifestyle for most Americans. This path only results in becoming physically inactive and developing heart disease. Other health risks are obesity, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and diabetes. After some time, bad habits transform from wants into needs due to habits progressing into addictions quickly. Another overly repulsive habit is alcohol abuse. Alcoholism increases the levels of triglycerides, a form of cholesterol that hardens your arteries.
Outcomes of Unhealthy Lifestyles
Results of an unhealthy lifestyle and an unhealthy diet contribute to approximately 678,000 deaths in the U.S annually. These fatal outcomes are associated with nutrition- and obesity-related diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and type 2 diabetes. In the last 30 years, obesity has doubled in adults, tripled in children, and quadrupled in adolescents (Schulman-Marcus, 2015).
Solutions
Adapting to a healthy lifestyle can be a big change, which makes life hard when you have to stay within your boundaries. Pursuing this goal is easier with PLC, which involves trained cardiologists helping you develop and maintain healthy lifestyles and habits (Schulman-Marcus, 2015). Counseling is believed to be more effective than educating patients about certain health risks they may be taking.
For example, individuals that have smoked for 30 years of their lives are not interested in hearing about how bad smoking is for their health. The patient should attempt to engage in actively trying to stop smoking or practicing other pernicious habits. PLC combines purposeful questioning and listening while paying attention to all details of an individual’s day-to-day life.
The listed techniques enable trained specialists to evaluate the client’s situation adequately. It has become very apparent that lifestyle choices are based on habits, temperaments, and personal obligations. Trying to break a long or even short-term habit or addiction can be very difficult. Although, this goal is possible to achieve if it is approached with dedication and determination. In an addict’s mind, whether the person is addicted to food, gambling, drugs, sex, the internet, alcohol, or gaming, addictions become more normal to them than reality itself. This manipulates the brain, which then makes you believe that a simple want is, in fact, a need.
Conclusion
To sum up, counseling can come in two forms. There is outpatient lifestyle counseling, and then there is inpatient counseling, preference is all that determines your choice. Therefore, PLC offers two alternatives, both of which are very satisfying and productive.
Reference
Schulman-Marcus, J. (2015). Personalized Lifestyle Counseling: An opportunity for FITs and ECs. Journal of the American College of Cardiology, 66(14), 1630-1632.