Tailoring your approach to health

Research is increasingly showing how simple lifestyle changes and diet can play a significant role in achieving good health. Reducing the risk of illness is clearly shown to be helped by having a healthy diet, and by making healthy consistent lifestyle choices. Mind you, diet has this fascinating issue around it - it can be the cause of your health issues or the resolution of them. What can be healthy to one person can create long term distress for someone else - we all know the person who had chocolate, a glass of brandy and cigar every day of their life and lived to 100, and the one who had health on a plate who had a heart attack at 30. It's understanding the 'why' behind this that can make all the difference to you.

This is where tailoring the approach to diet and lifestyle changes is absolutely key, not only for each person but throughout their lifetime. Understanding the health picture that they were born with from the parents can make dietary choices and lifestyle changes a moveable feast so to speak! What's right for now, may not be right in 5, 10, or 15 years time, but often our diets don't reflect the ongoing needs of our body's, and we rarely consider tailoring them for time of life, or even the seasons.

Our food can have incredible beneficial effects if we consider what the body is needing, but often we make the same meals for each person in a family, or eat the same favourite foods day in day out - or even the same food groups for each meal, without really considering if it's truly nourishing and feeding our body in the way it needs.

We often apply the same diet approaches thinking it's going to suit, when we are all individuals (most of us want to be considered as such), so why would we think diet and lifestyle would be a one size fits all? Well, we all know that there is no one size fits all that will ever be right, hence why there are so many diet books on the market, so many dietary approaches available to follow. This is where your intuition should kick in and take control.

Listening to your body and it's needs is really important if you are to support it in having good health, because no one, no book, guru or practitioner will ever be able to tell you more than you truly will know yourself from just listening, and observing what your body needs. I'm not saying that you might not want to research or work with someone to gain guidance, but there is such a huge amount of conflicting dietary and lifestyle information out there, it's important to go back to your own wisdom and eat from the natural world that clearly gives you energy, vitality, bright eyes and bushy tails - you should feel great on waking, light, and fresh.

What draws you, when you smell something how right does it feel then to eat it? When you taste it, does it taste just right for that moment? Our foods are medicinal as well as soulful, and heartfelt if you are feeding yourself from this perspective of listening. Tailoring your diet and lifestyle matters, because we are all individual.