This is the Time for Lifestyle
A little over a year ago, we founded the Mexican Association of Lifestyle Medicine (AMMEV). What was supposed to be our foundational meeting at a restaurant, ended up being a zoom meeting where we all showed up quite distraught, as quarantine had just begun. That’s the moment the association came to life; and even though it wasn’t the perfect moment, we all pushed forward and made it happen.
Lifestyle Medicine has a very simple premise: “The basis of health is in the way we eat, rest, move, and relate to others.” These actions are quite basic and repetitive , really. Every human in this world, to any extent, eats, rests, moves, and relates to others every day.
And still, it seems like we don’t have the time, the attention and the care to do it in the way we all wish it would be.
The association is comprised mainly of health professionals: physicians, nutritionists, orthodontists, psychologists. There’s also some marketers, economists, and sociologists. But above all, it’s made up of men and women, fathers and mothers, patients. People.
The behind the scenes of this movement — because it’s more than just an association — lurk the same difficulties that health professionals, workers, parents, and patients face to balance their individual lifestyles. Furthermore, the creation of the movement mirrors the difficulties that societies and entire countries face to change economic, political, and cultural systems to reach equilibria. And even more, it reflects the difficulty of the planet to come back into homeostasis, where the lifestyle, not only of the people, but of every living thing, is in balance.
3 examples:
AMMEV as an organization is a living thing. It lives because of the living beings that are part of it, the alliances it forms, the income it generates. It depends on a harmonious relationship between its members, the decisions that are agreed upon by the majority, as well as in the activities it promotes and executes.
To be able to achieve all this, the board members meet periodically to organize and execute: there are people who can’t join at night, others can’t during the day; some find it easy to provide support via economic means, while others not so much; for some, it’s a refreshing activity to be close to people who think and feel the same way as they do, for others it can become yet another demanding task on their already busy calendar.
At the same time that we want to come together to put out the message of Lifestyle Medicine, each one of us is trying to balance all the pillars in our own life: sons and daughters, parents, marriages, divorces, work, money, time. Everything’s important but we don’t know exactly how to balance it all without burning ourselves out in the process.
It’s the same thing with our patients. As health professionals, we ask them to eat well, sleep enough, to meditate and exercise, to rest, to be at peace with everyone, and to take care of their finances. But they experience the same problems we do. They too are faced with rushed lives, fixed habits, and they live in a system and culture that is in a hurry and that reminds them of their scarcity and insufficiency constantly. Our system sells fast food, easy fixes, and immediate distractions while it demands many other things and forbids signs of weakness or lagging behind.
Lifestyle is easy to explain, but maybe it’s the hardest thing in the world to do because it’s intertwined with our identity, our history, with our ego, with our emotional fragility, and with our constant state of not knowing what life is and how to live it.
In society, the same thing happens. Even though we are full of messages and knowledge to properly care for the pillars of wellbeing, the reality is that the majority of society does not live life in balance. We live in a fast-paced society that does not have time to stop and rethink its systems, like its way of producing and distributing food and consumer goods, or its way of turning the TV off and replacing it with rest or human connection. Society lives in a hurry, building aspirational life models, and even though it connects everyone through social media, it also disconnects us in many ways. The way of eating, of moving, of stopping in society is dictated by the large structural forces which nobody has control over. And sometimes it may seem like that’s the only way to live. Or survive.
Our planet suffers in a similar way. The planet, in the vast majority of places throughout the world, is also out of balance. The planet needs to rest, regenerate, meditate, move, and relate to others in a different way. The production systems, transportation, socioeconomic divergence, separation with the animals, plants, and minerals, has us running to keep us on the move , but in a manner that is not highly recommended by the “cosmic doctors”.
We see that the same difficulties that exist in building a lifestyle medicine movement at an institutional level, are the same difficulties that we each face as individuals, as society and the planet.
¿When?
¿When is the moment that we will find balance?
If I was writing this in the idealistic tone of my parents’ generation, I would stop my writing here with this “call to action” and “leave the reader thinking”. Appealing perhaps to a time gone by or a remote culture where equilibrium or homeostasis was possible, where now, the modern man has been through it all, has misinterpreted it, and has now become a victim of his own success. “Man created technology, capitalism, industrialization, and now is a victim of his own conquests, and it’s too late to go back”– says this discourse.
Although this is an assessment that is correct and that moves us to reflect, it continues to leave us in an insufficiency, in a complaint, and an externalization of the problem: “Somebody else is at fault: It could be my doctor, my wife, my job, my president, a virus, the lack of money.”
Another problem with this discourse is that threats and fatalism are not the best motivation to change. In the same way a doctor can’t ask her patient to change her habits from one day to another, threatening that if she continues in this way she will die, our figurative fathers can’t ask us to change whilst reminding us constantly of all the things we are doing wrong and the nightmares that await us if we continue down this path.
No. Lifestyle is always an expression of our identity; it’s intertwined with our own personal story, with our ego, our emotions, with the relationship we have with time, money, and our body. Lifestyle is the expression of what we understand as “life” and therefore depends greatly of what we understand as “death.”
¿What is death to you?
Maybe this is the seminal question of personal, collective, and planetary lifestyle.
¿What is life to you?
Perhaps this is the programmatic question for the individual, social, and universal lifestyle.
In the new discourse, we take what we have inherited from the world of our parents–not only the flesh and bone ones, but our ideological, systemic, and cultural parents. We accept this as our present moment. We choose this present moment. And we choose to keep co-creating the future.
This is the time of lifestyle. This is the time to try different styles to be able to live different lives. And to get different outcomes. Through trial and error, balance will show up every once in a while, and allow us to get a glimpse of what we can individually and collectively create.
This is the time for lifestyle. Because we can’t wait for time to adjust, for our wallets to adjust, for government to adjust, for the world to adjust to us in order to be able to express what we already are.
This is the time for lifestyle, because, even though we might fear not achieving balance, we already know what it feels to fall into fatalism, victimization, or even worse, indifference.
When I see the challenges we’ve faced to bring this association to life, sometimes I wish I didn’t have them at all; but at other times–like when I write these lines–, I’m reminded that those challenges are exactly the uphill battles we chose to have. Because as a movement, we want to appreciate them, and we want, through lifestyle, to use them as our greatest source of energy and teaching, as the very fuel for what the lifestyle medicine movement is and wants to be.
To those of us that form a part of this community, we know that NOW IS THE TIME FOR LIFESTYLE. But we also know that we need to create a space and time for our own individual, community, and institutional habits so that we may start shifting gears. We allow and celebrate this space of reflection, of being between-stories, to be able to co-create the stories of the future.
AMMEV is a community, a movement, and a cosmovision. We reflect each other. We take care of each other. We create each other. This is the same thing we want for our patients, our families, our communities, and our planet.
Victor Saadia is the Founder and Executive Director of the Mexican Association of Lifestyle Medicine (AMMEV). The first national congress will happen in Nov 19th and 20th 2021 in Monterrey, Mexico.
