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Blink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
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The 4 Pillar Plan summary
Rangan Chatterjee
How to Relax, Eat, Move and Sleep Your Way to a Longer, Healthier Life
21 mins
Brief summary
The 4 Pillar Plan by Rangan Chatterjee is a health and wellness book that focuses on four key pillars: relaxation, food, movement, and sleep. The author offers practical advice on how to improve your health and well-being by making small changes in each of these areas.
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The 4 Pillar Plan
Summary of 9 key ideas
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Key idea 1 of 9
Maintaining a healthy body isn’t just about treating symptoms of illness, it’s about a progressive approach to managing your lifestyle.
What would you do if you woke up one day with a rash on your arm? You’d likely book an appointment with a doctor. The doctor would, in turn, probably prescribe you an ointment to soothe and treat it.
Situations like this might not strike you as odd, but they conceal a deeper truth: medicine today concerns itself almost exclusively with diagnosing and treating symptoms. What’s forgotten is that the body is a complex, interconnected system, so the causes of an ailment may not be straightforward.
It’s true of mental conditions too. Go to the doctor with symptoms of depression, and the doctor is likely to send you off with a prescription for antidepressants once he’s said something about the chemical imbalance in your brain. However, according to the author, depression is caused by a variety of factors including poor diet, stress, or too much or too little physical activity.
The author believes doctors should stop focusing so much on symptoms. Instead, they should take a multipronged approach that recognizes the body's complexity and acknowledges that all its parts are connected. He calls this approach progressive medicine.
Let’s return to the rash. A rash could indicate an overly reactive immune system; this, in turn, could be due to stress or food intolerance, or perhaps abnormal bacteria in the gut.
You see, sometimes applying an ointment on the skin is not enough. If you’re going to take progressive medicine seriously, then your lifestyle is where you can make a real difference.
There are four pillars that the author considers critical for staying in good health: relax, eat, move and sleep.
By encouraging his patients to adjust their lifestyles in one or more of these areas, Chatterjee says he has helped many of them out of depression, reversed type 2 diabetes, and even relieved symptoms of menopause.
So what exactly do these four pillars involve? Let's go into more details in the next blinks.
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What is The 4 Pillar Plan about?
The 4 Pillar Plan (2017) is a practical guide to living a healthy life. These blinks will show you what it takes to create the best possible conditions for both your body and your mind. It’s all based on the four pillars of healthy behavior: relax, eat, move and sleep.
Best quote from The 4 Pillar Plan
The future of medicine will be about more doctors being super-generalists, rather than super-specialists.
—Rangan Chatterjee
Who should read The 4 Pillar Plan?
- Stressed or overworked business owners and entrepreneurs
- Anyone looking to improve their overall health
- Patients with chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes
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