The term “wellness” covers a wide range of services and philosophies. If your business falls in the category of wellness, you may be involved in anything from diagnostic testing or nutritional analysis to occupational therapy or weight loss. The common thread among these businesses is that no matter what aspect of wellness is your main focus, you desire to see your patients or clients thrive and achieve new levels of functionality and comfort.
Is there a common underlying factor that can help patients who are seeking care in any and all of these categories–and contribute to solutions for them all?
Well, yes.
These programs center around a concept called the Vitality Advantage, which is achieved by achieving a balanced lifestyle through diet, exercise and rest. Small habitual changes in each patient’s day-to-day choices can result in significant changes in the body.
Whether your clients are struggling with mobility, chronic conditions or mental health, this advice can make meaningful progress possible.
Mobility: How the Vitality Advantage Helps Create a Chain Reaction of Strength
Patients who struggle with mobility each face unique challenges.
They may vary in weight, including being under or overweight, suffer from inflammation, weakness or poor alignment. These may be incredibly painful, but even if they're not, clients may still find their condition incredibly restrictive. Whatever plagues nonmobile clients, vitality will be crucial in overcoming them for good.
When your clients begin to make small daily changes to their choices, they can quickly begin to see results.
A diet focused on real food and with a good balance between protein, fiber, complex carbohydrates and healthy fats can help clients achieve an appropriate weight, reduce any inflammation and soothe pain.
Habits of daily movement and exercise—including the important movements that your on-site medical or fitness professional advises—will help the body find a new normal, correcting poor balance and alignment, and mitigate inflammation.
Additionally, setting better habits of rest, troubleshooting bedtime habits and even advising on pillow types and placement can promote recovery and healing.
Chronic Conditions: Vitality Allows the Body to Conquer Challenges
Chronic conditions are on the rise across many developed nations. As lifestyles become less and less natural and work becomes more sedentary, metabolic, hormonal and pain disorders become more and more prevalent.
Some patients view a diagnosis as an end point. They feel that their healthy life is over and nothing but hopelessness and attempts at symptom management lie ahead.
However, if I've learned anything in my decades of treating patients, it's that many chronic conditions are able to be halted or even reversed with even the simplest of lifestyle changes.
Just changing a diet away from processed foods and toward natural, whole, living foods fuels the body in a uniquely healthy way, beginning the process of healing the gut, rebalancing the microbiome and showing the body a new way to fuel itself.
Adding in even light to moderate exercise helps improve circulation, which allows the body to properly flush out the impurities in blood. It also signals the endocrine system to make different hormones, reducing cortisol and insulin and increasing human growth hormone and dopamine.
Changes to bedtime habits can create better sleep too, which in turn allows healing and makes the waking hours more productive and enjoyable.
Mental Health: A Well Body Helps Create a Well Mind
So many mental health challenges are exacerbated by imbalanced body chemistry.
Blood sugar and insulin levels have been proven to have a massive impact on mood, cognition and stability. When your clients improve their diet, they may find that their anxiety is eased, their depression may feel lighter and their minds may be clearer and more focused.
As they then begin to see improvement in their health and achieve life goals, a new feedback loop of new improvements will bring improved self esteem, leading to more ambitious health goals. Everyone knows that more exercise means better mood, but many people who suffer from mental health challenges struggle with establishing this habit long enough for it to make a difference.
When professionals speak compassionately regarding ways to start new exercise habits, they communicate in a way that replaces despondency with hope and skepticism with excitement for new possibility.
Don't just tell people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. Present real benefits that come from even the smallest new habits, and allow the improvements that result to speak for themselves—leading patients to choose even more changes as they feel the difference in their mood.
Poor rest contributes to lack of performance and low moods, worsening symptoms of depression, anxiety and many other disorders. However, when factors like phones before bedtime, too much light in the bedroom or poor air quality are improved, a better quality of life can begin to produce better mental health outcomes.
These are considerations for taking on a compassionate view—not just presenting information about the impact of better rest, but giving actionable advice that makes real change achievable.
Implementing the Vitality Advantage With your Clients
The Vitality Advantage isn’t just wishful thinking or another packet of information your clients won’t even want or use. It's an approach that takes a compassionate perspective to your client's lifestyle, and translates it into practical, sustainable life changes they can make.
By giving your patients a navigable path to improving the overall framework of vitality in their life, you can set clients up to succeed in all their wellness goals–while you work your magic in your area of expertise.
Between your expert intervention on their specific wellness goals and the Vitality Advantage to center on how to improve their overall quality of life, your clients will be equipped to enjoy a lifetime of better health.
