If you follow any form of media, you no doubt will notice that everywhere you look there is someone giving you health advice.
The newest weight loss tips, newly discovered carcinogenic foods, how alcohol is actually good for you, but also strictly bad for you but also you can enjoy it in moderation… the list of conflicting and often unsolicited health advice we are exposed to on a daily basis is exhausting.
If you have ever scrolled through the likes of Instagram especially, the onslaught of health tips is overwhelming.
What’s worse, is that most of these tips come from people totally unqualified to give advice.
Nowadays it seems everyone is an expert on health, regardless of whether they have been properly trained in what they’re talking about.
This new obsession with achieving perfect health can in many ways be counterproductive. When we are given too many tips and hacks and try to incorporate them into our lives, they become more of a to-do list, a tick box exercise of starting each morning with a probiotic, drinking lemon water on an empty stomach, hitting 30g of protein per meal.
This totally takes away from the point of incorporating healthy habits into your life. It is not about doing them because so and so on instagram said it is ‘good’ for you, it is about how it makes you feel in your body.
Take blood glucose tracking for example. Newly popularised interest in how blood sugar spikes can negatively impact our energy levels has paved the way for new apps to crop up, which use real time data from sensors implanted in your arm to continuously monitor your blood glucose levels. The information can show when your blood sugar sharply increases after consuming certain foods, which over time has both short and long term consequences on our health.
The success of these apps hinges on the fact that we all respond differently to diet, so having this personalised plan is the only way to tell how your blood sugar is affected by what foods.
In theory this is a great way of gaining insight into how your body functions and uses energy sources.
On the flip side, is this really information we need?
More importantly, is this really, in the long run, information we will use in our diet?
Given the pace of modern day living, busy jobs, social and family lives often decide our food choices for us, it is not always convenient to start our day with an egg white omelette. Whatsmore, if we know what we should be eating and end up having to go against that, it subconsciously incurs a sense of guilt that we’ve eaten ‘badly’.
As a health coach I have lots of people asking me about this as a recent trend, and if I think they should sign up.
In this case, considering the expense, the effort, the time needed to successfully complete the ‘trial weeks’ and subsequently stick to this way of eating, my advice would be this:
If you do not struggle with depleted energy levels or do not have obvious signs of blood sugar imbalances, this is not something you need.
There are lots of similar health trends where my advice would be similar.
The point of all these trends is that they enhance your life. They make you feel measurably better, happier, healthier.
When we rely on external factors to dictate how we live and neglect to check in on how we actually feel, and how our bodies are reacting (if at all) to these changes, then we will never enjoy these supposed ‘benefits’. That’s to say, if you drink apple cider vinegar with water every morning out of habit, without really tuning into how it makes you feel, it is utterly pointless.
We are bombarded with all these things that we ‘need’ to do for our health…
The only thing we need to do is tune in to what does not make us feel healthy, and specifically look at what changes we can make to improve it, really paying attention to how we feel to know what works.
And if you find it hard to figure that out on your own, don’t look to Instagram to find the answer, it will likely confuse you more- advice out there is at best very general, and at worst just wrong. Get help from a healthcare professional, and drown out the noise.
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