Luke Coutinho, Holistic & Lifestyle Coach, recently joined NewsX for an insightful conversation as part of NewsX Influencer A-List. In the exclusive conversation. Luke highlighted the importance of preventive wellness and what is the difference between preventive healthcare and integrated and lifestyle medicine. Read excerpts:
Talking about the kind of content that he is putting out, Luke said, “The content I put out is to help people get their health better. When I say health, we are not just talking about physical health. We look at cancer, Alzheimer, diabetes, weight gain, weight loss everything but there is always a concept, which I call lifestyle. We try and teach people to eat better. We try to teach people not to do fad diets and go through extremes because that destroys you. We teach people to listen to their bodies because your body can only tell you when to stop eating, how much to eat, what time to eat. We teach people to sleep better because sleep deprivation is one of the biggest problems in our country that is related to every single disease. Social media keeps us awake. We need these reminders and awareness to sleep better.”
“The content I put out is also learnings from my patients, who suffer from a sickness. We teach people on the Internet what not they should do and what they should do. If I learn that a patient has been constipated from the time they were 10 years old to 40 years old and today they have colorectal cancer. We try to teach people, without inducing fear, that constipation is not something that is okay and constipation is something that you should address. I use my platform to inspire people. I don’t believe in motivation. Motivation is for people who are not yet committed to their goals, so they need to be motivated. When you are committed to your goal, you don’t need to be motivated. I always give people a simple example, ‘You go out there and you buy a nice rolls royce or an expensive handbag. Do I need to motivate you to look after it? No, you will look after it because you have assigned it a value. I teach people to assign value to their health, relationships, and their children. When you assign value to it, you nurture it and look after it. My paradigm of content revolves around exercise, nutrition, emotional wellness, sleep and spirituality but not connected to religion. Spirituality could be something as simple as our life. The Human body is a gift of life. When you are abusing it, you are not being spiritual. I don’t care how much you go to the church, temple, and mosque. You are not being spiritual if you abuse the gift of life, which is your body. I try to keep my content very simple and doable so that people can decide right now that if they want to make a change, they have the tools to make the change,” he added.
When asked for his take on preventive healthcare and the difference between preventive healthcare and integrated and lifestyle medicine, he explained, “Integrated and lifestyle medicine is when you have a patient who comes to you. For example, like a cancer patient has chemotherapy and medications, in integrated and lifestyle medicine, we manage the side effects of that. We keep their immunity high, inflammation low using foods, right exercise when you have neuropathy, lymphedema. We try to get them to sleep better so that they can recover better. We try to bring down their stress levels because stress and cancer and every disease have a direct connection. We try to treat the problem and address the root cause of it. While allopathy looks at the symptom, we address the root cause and we try to manage the quality of their life and help them stay in remission or preventing any further damage happening to their body.”
He further added, “In preventive wellness for you and me, for example, what should I do so I can possibly prevent the onset of disease. If I am pre-diabetic today, what are the 5 things I can do so I don’t become diabetic. If I have high cholesterol, what are the top 10 things I can do to bring it down so it doesn’t become a bad lipid profile and a heart attack or a stroke. Preventive wellness is focusing on your lifestyle, the way you should live, eat, sleep, move and think, so that you can possibly prevent a condition and even if you get a condition, you recover from it far better than someone who has not built a strong body and a strong mind.”