How your nutrition and lifestyle habits can impact your overall well-being.

Your diet, supplements or workouts may not necessarily be an insurance plan for ensuring your good health. These are all things that you do on a daily basis when it comes to feeding your body, managing your mood, dealing with pain, getting sufficient rest, and avoiding any diseases.

While it is seldom about knowledge, it is hard to make any changes in your lifestyle when you are very busy. Small changes to the way you eat and live can have a positive impact on your life and lower the risk of developing chronic diseases.

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Modern lifestyle medicine emphasises healthy eating, exercise, good sleep, reducing stress, having a good social circle and avoiding harmful substances. We endeavour to treat the underlying causes of your health issues.

Many common health issues we suffer from, such as fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep, weight gain, back/neck pain and increased stress, are all impacted by multiple lifestyle factors. Whilst you may be eating fairly well, if you’re not getting quality sleep (6 hours), sitting for long periods (10 hours), not doing any strength training, and relying on caffeine, you’ll start to see a decline in your wellbeing.

Overall, the aim isn’t to optimise your lifestyle but to create a sustainable base. Eating good quality foods, getting regular physical activity, getting good recovery and having a supportive environment.

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Whilst you don’t need to be strict with your diet, a healthy diet should follow the principles of adequacy, balance, moderation and variety (World Health Organisation). This means ensuring you’re getting enough nutrients without over-consuming them chronically. Balancing your energy intake with physical activity, avoiding over-consumption of foods that aren’t helping you and eating a variety of unprocessed foods.

For most Busy Professionals, we’d recommend starting with improving your go-to meals. Try to eat meals with plenty of vegetables/fruit, protein, complex carbs (beans, whole grains, potatoes) and healthy fats (nuts, seeds, olive oil, fish). WHO recommends aiming to eat 400g of fruits and vegetables (approx. 5 portions), less than 10% of daily energy from free sugars and less than 5g salt per day.

Hydration is also important, especially if you’re drinking lots of coffee, energy drinks or have back-to-back video calls. Whilst you don’t need to track how much you’re drinking, making water visible throughout your day and pairing your caffeinated drinks with food will help reduce that 3 pm slump and tempt you into snacking.

One approach would be to enhance your favourite meals. This could include making use of one meal that has vegetables/salad, proteins, carbs, and healthy fats. It can even mean ensuring that your favourite meal contains vegetables/salad, proteins, and whole grains/legumes.

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Being physically active is one of the best investments that you can make for your health. The World Health Organisation suggests that people aged between 18 and 64 years should strive to achieve at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity each week. In addition, we should aim to do strengthening exercises on 2 or more days per week. We can also increase our moderate-intensity activity to 300min per week.

This can be achieved by doing ‘snacks’ of physical activity throughout the day. Perhaps have a 25-minute brisk walk at lunchtime, 2 x 20-minute strength sessions, cycle to your meeting or do some calls whilst walking. This can help make physical activity a consistent habit.

Sitting for long periods can cause stiffness, poor circulation and neck/shoulder/lower back pain. As most of us work at a desk, we should try to get up and move every 30-60 mins. This is not a replacement for physical activity but will reduce the negative effects of sitting.

A key element to consider is ergonomics. If your screen isn’t high enough, your chair isn’t encouraging good posture, and you spend hours on your laptop without any support, you’ll create bad posture. Doing an ergonomic assessment can help to identify areas that could be improved. This can help to create a plan that works for your body, working style and current pain. Painbegone can be really helpful in doing an ergonomic assessment.

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Sleep is a great way to recharge. Whilst you’re sleeping, your body will be regulating your hormones, creating memories, boosting your immune system and your energy levels. Adults should aim to get 7 hours of sleep daily. Unfortunately, statistics show that 30.5% of American adults do not get enough sleep (less than 7 hours) (CDC).

An insufficient amount of sleep will increase your risk of obesity, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, stroke, anxiety and depression. As a high performer, it is very important to make sure you include sleep in your system in order to be able to work focused.

In the same way, you can manage stress. We might have times when we feel stressed, but if we get too stressed, it can cause problems such as sleeping issues, eating poorly, increased blood pressure, changes in mood and pain. We can use proven techniques such as mindfulness and relaxation to manage our stress.

Create a wind-down routine at the end of your day. Perhaps do a quick recap of what you need to do tomorrow, log off work applications, go for a short walk and don’t use your bed as an office. This doesn’t need to be complicated but should give your nervous system a clear signal that your day is over.

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The most sustainable wellbeing plan will include 1 nutritional habit, 1 physical activity and 1 recovery habit. Commit to these habits for 2 weeks.

Nutrition – Aim to have a protein- and produce-packed lunch. Physical Activity – Try to fit in 3 x 20-minute walks or 2 short strength sessions. Recovery – Try to go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Do not look at any work notifications within 30 minutes before bed. Small steps to set you up.

Looking at a software engineer, they might suffer from sitting for long periods of time and neck tension in the late afternoon. They could begin by walking for 10 minutes post-lunch, keeping a water bottle at their desk and reviewing their ergonomics (screen and chair height). After 2 weeks, they could start to add in strength training twice per week and use an easy wearable/app to track their consistency. Painbegone can support this by providing you with a personal nutrition plan, lifestyle coach and pain management therapies.

The aim is to make it easy to do the right thing. Have some easy go-to meals, have your walking shoes easily accessible, schedule your physical activity and charge your phone outside of your room.

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Although technology may aid in tracking one’s well-being, it can also make one feel that he or she has to do well in this respect. The optimal way of using wearable technology and tracking would be to spot any trends and change things accordingly.

Depending on your goals, you could track your average steps per week, strength training, protein, sleep and waist measurement. If you’re managing chronic pain, you may want to track pain flares, activity tolerance, sleep quality, stress levels and ergonomic exposure. It’s more about looking at trends over a few weeks.

Tracking can also help clinicians and coaches identify trends. For example, you may notice that you’re consistently getting poor sleep, missing meals and sitting for long periods, leading to a pain flare. This can help create a plan from a general feeling of frustration.

When using health technology, ensure you’re protecting your privacy. Wearables are great at tracking your movements/quality of sleep; however, they will not assist you in making a diagnosis. In case your symptoms are severe and getting worse, I recommend consulting an expert to get help.

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While recommendations can come in handy, everybody is different. In case you have chronic pain, an active travel lifestyle, insulin resistance, gut issues, or work in a stressful environment, a tailored nutritional program may benefit you. This can take into account your likes, medical history, schedule and goals. Lifestyle coaching will enable you to develop lasting habits.

Personalised nutritional advice, lifestyle coaching and pain management treatments can be provided by Painbegone to help create lasting changes to improve your symptoms. We will identify any barriers preventing you from making these changes.

If you are experiencing chronic lower back pain, we can provide you with a structured plan to increase your physical activity, ergonomic advice, stress management and nutritional advice to help you recover.

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As your well-being is affected by how well you eat and live, you shouldn’t be too perfect and should just focus on a few things such as eating healthy foods, doing exercise, sleeping properly and managing stress in the workplace.

The first important thing for Busy Professionals is building habits. You should concentrate on tracking all the factors that can affect your behaviour. Make all decisions according to the trend and consult specialists if you have problems with pain, tiredness, and other signs. Structure will help you avoid dependency on willpower.