NUTRITION &LIFESTYLE
MEDICINE
Nutrition & Lifestyle Medicine by Amanda Heading
Using diet, exercise and other lifestyle interventions, I help people recover or improve their health, performance and vitality, so they can continue to do, or exceed in, the things they enjoy in life.
I work with anyone who wants to live life well or perform to the best of their ability.
Lifestyle medicine
Lifestyle medicine is not new: Hippocrates (460-370 BC) identified that lifestyle choices, along with personality traits, predisposed people to certain health conditions. He not only saw food as medicine, but recognised that exercise, rest and general wellbeing regarding the body, mind and spirit were key concepts to living well.
“Without exercise, a good diet alone is not sufficient and eventually medical treatment will be needed.”
With the development of modern medicine and pharmaceutical interventions, there seems to be such a disconnect between our health and how we live our lives, that we've come to rely on medication or operation to ‘cure’ us. We seem to have forgotten that how we live, eat, move and feel can have a huge impact on the very foundations of our health.
Your context matters
The context of our life contributes massively to how we feel, what we eat and how much we move - all ultimately affecting our mental, emotional and physical health. We’re far more likely to make better food choices and move more if it wasn’t for life’s stressors: the demanding job, child care, financial constraints, ongoing care of an elderly relative or family member. We may not be able to change modern life, but we can identify its triggers which negatively affect us. Managing our life load is vital in achieving good health.
Health is complex
… and so is the human body. A simple solution or a one-size-fits all approach is often the wrong approach. We can be inundated by quick fix solutions from social media, misleading messages from food manufacturers and even pharmaceutical companies offering this drug or that vaccine as the magic answer for us all.
Generalised health advice can often frighten us into knee-jerk reactions, the hope of quick fixes and the despair when these (once again) don’t work. We can end up feeling worse, like we’ve failed and that we have no other options.
But we have do have options. We just have to identify the right ones for each of us, in order to gain back control of our health.
How I work
You may have been given a medical diagnosis you want support with. Or you may be feeling ‘not well’, not yourself or fed up with your body not working as normal. And you may have hit a dead end via traditional medical practice, frustrated with being pigeon-holed with some pseudo medical label or fed-up with social media fixes telling you your problem but not giving you any answers that work for you.
Using lifestyle medicine, I take a fully integrative approach to explore, identify and then address the underlying issues causing your lack of health or performance. I specialise in taking into consideration the whole of you. While taking a specialist approach can sometimes be an obvious course of action, contributing factors or other underlying causes can be missed, because the view is too narrow. Taking a step back can give perspective, especially when considered throughout the timeline of your life and through each life-stage: not only the root causes to your ill health can be identified but the triggers to symptoms, as well as anything that perpetuates this current state.
I combine the skills and experience developed from my clinical practice, updated with evidence-based and science-led research, but always centred around the individual person.
I aim to guide, support, educate and empower you, so you feel in control of your health. I seek to enable rather than disable you, by guiding you through the options which are relevant to you. We start with you. Because no-one is the same as every-one.
Taking a personalised, integrative, comprehensive approach - where the whole of you, past and present is considered - is the key to optimal present and future health.
Walking the talk
My motivation is all about proactive wellbeing and performance. Having been brought up with the values of wholesome foods and regular exercise as the foundation for good health, I’ve followed these principles and been involved in sport and exercise all my life.
From playing sports and studying food and nutrition at school, I’ve continued these all the way through to a very advanced level in physical therapy and nutrition science, as well as applying them to my own sporting performance.
Along with a proactive attitude to my continued professional development and nutritional/training advances I really do walk the talk! Read more here.
Ready to work together?
Without health, life can feel very much compromised, so investing in your health is investing in your future. If you’re ready to commit to achieving better health, please get in touch - I’d love to help.