Healthcare professionals around the globe can agree that the key to building a foundation of health and wellness involves the four pillars of health. These pillars work together to keep your mind and body healthy. This includes improved immunity to fight off acute and chronic illness, blood sugar regulation, emotional health, sustaining a healthy weight, and much more.
The 4 pillars include:
1 - Nutrition (hydration included!)
There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to nutrition. Your nutritional needs depend on a wide variety of factors, including genetics, age, activity level, stage of your life, and gut microbiome. Optimizing nutrition with a wide variety of lean proteins and fruits & vegetables, while minimizing ultra-processed foods and refined sugar is supportive in creating a foundation of health. Easy food swaps include: trading white rice for quinoa or cauliflower rice or opting for a smaller portion of fermented sourdough or seed sprouted bread vs highly refined white bread, while adding in some healthy fats and proteins to optimize the meal. It is all about balance and strategically adding in nutritionally dense foods to optimize your health. Eating the rainbow is often overlooked, but such an important part of getting all the nutrients needed for overall health.
On average, Americans typically consume about 1 L (4 cups) of drinking water per day, which doesn’t sound like enough, right? Drinking enough water seems to be a struggle for a lot of people. At the end of the day, there is no getting around the fact that getting enough water is vital to your health. Water has the ability to flush toxins from the body and promote regular bowel movements. As a general rule of thumb, it’s best to aim for half of your body weight in fluid ounces (ex: 150 lbs =75 fl oz of water). The exact amount of total water needed in a day depends on many factors included – age, weight, activity level, climate, and overall health status (if you are fighting acute/chronic infections).
In order to stay hydrated, you can always drink plain water, but to jazz it up, you can always add fresh mint, kiwi, parsley, lemon, cucumbers and/or berries! Also, being mindful of implementing soups and water-dense fruits/vegetables like watermelon, strawberries, cucumbers, zucchini and tomatoes into your daily rotation can help keep you hydrated as well.
Adding in electrolytes to your water daily is proven to help stay adequately hydrated and energized. Scientifically speaking electrolytes like sodium & potassium assist in keeping your cells hydrated.
2 - Sleep
Sleep….The most commonly forgotten pillar of health, but one of my favorites! Research shows that when you sleep, your body is in repair mode and naturally detoxing cellular waste. Lack of sleep is directly associated with an increased risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes and cravings. Additionally, it increases the hunger hormone, ghrelin, while correlating the satiety hormone, leptin.
Tips to prioritize sleep include: aim for 7-9 hours of sleep a night, be consistent with bedtime/wakeup time to support your circadian rhythm, turn off all screens 1 hour before bed to minimize blue light exposure, and lastly create a relaxing bedtime routine to signal your brain that its time to rest.
TIP: Adding a red lightbulb to your nightstand lamp is a nice touch to help with reducing blue light exposure before bed!
3 - Stress Management
Stress is a part of life for all of us. While we can’t completely eliminate everyday stressors, we can learn ways to manage stress in a healthy way. This is becoming top of mind for so many people looking for answers to their health. It is one of the most important pillars of health in my opinion! Stress can look like overfilling your calendar, lacking boundaries, or worrying about things out of your control – resulting in your body shifting into “fight or flight” mode. Poorly managed stress can lead to a laundry list of chronic illnesses and suppresses our immune response, which elevates the inflammation in our body altering blood sugar control, digestion issues, and hormone function to name a few.
When the body is under both physiological and emotional stress, cortisol is released from the adrenal glands causing blood sugar to rise to send energy to our muscles to “run away from the tiger!” As you can imagine, if this is chronic, this takes a toll on your immune system and overall functionality of your body as a whole. Over time, chronic stress can deplete nutrients, weaken the immune system (with risks of developing autoimmune conditions), disrupt digestive processes, and cause blood sugar fluctuations. Nutrition can only improve your health so much, if you are not managing your stress management then this needs to be addressed.
In my experience working with 1,000s of patients, long fasting windows and very low carbohydrate diets does not serve most people long-term. The reason being it can cause low amounts of glucose to be present in the blood, causing the body to produce cortisol to keep blood sugar levels in a healthy range. While these diets can be incredibly supportive when treating certain conditions, it’s best to be cautious and listen to your own body’s needs. In the same token, it’s best to avoid eating habits that spike blood sugar levels that can result in a subsequent blood sugar crash – this is typically from long stretches of time without eating and eating highly processed, high glycemic foods.
Simple ways to turn on the parasympathetic nervous system (and turn off the sympathetic nervous system) is to incorporate deep breathing throughout your day – it can be done anytime and anywhere! Commit to 10 minutes a day and you will see your mindset shift turn your day around.
4 - Movement
Moving your body everyday is pivotal for foundational health! The key is finding movement that brings you joy to aid in creating a sustainable habit. Exercise is an incredible way to support not only body composition, but immune function, hormone health, and stress management. Moderate exercise at least 5 days a week has been shown to support the immune system, lower inflammation and aid in weight loss, along with promoting longevity. One study shows that people who walked at least 20 minutes a day for a minimum of 5 days a week had 43% freer sick days!
FINAL THOUGHTS
As a Registered Dietitian, I typically lead with nutrition as a great first step to set an overall foundation for health & wellness, but there is so much value in taking a holistic approach to working on all pillars of health to keep your mind and body healthy. Nutrition, sleep, stress management, and movement all work in synergy to support overall health and wellbeing. Make sure to focus on all these elements with all of your patients when developing a treatment plan!
This article is for general informational purposes only and not intended for medical intervention. Please seek medical advice from your medical doctor or dietitian before making any nutrition or lifestyle changes.
Amy is a Functional Medicine Registered Dietitian (RDN), as well as a Nutrition & Wellness Communications Consultant with many years of marketing experience and her Master of Public Health degree (MPH). She is passionate about transforming our broken healthcare system and getting to the root cause of symptoms not putting bandaids on them.