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The 4 Pillar Plan
How to Relax, Eat, Move and Sleep Your Way to a Longer, Healthier Life
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.
- Stressed or overworked business owners and entrepreneurs
- Anyone looking to improve their overall health
- Patients with chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes
Rangan Chatterjee is a medical doctor based in the United Kingdom. After working as a general practitioner for nearly 20 years, he decided to become an author and teach others about what he has learned over the course of his career in medicine.
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The 4 Pillar Plan
How to Relax, Eat, Move and Sleep Your Way to a Longer, Healthier Life
- Read in 16 minutes
- Audio & text available
- Contains 10 key ideas
Synopsis
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.
Key idea 1 of 10
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.
Key ideas in this title
- Maintaining a healthy body isn’t just about treating symptoms of illness, it’s about a progressive approach to managing your lifestyle.
- Relaxation keeps you healthy, so take 15 minutes for it every day.
- Stillness is good for your health, so make it part of your day with a simple breathing exercise.
- Sugar does you and your tastebuds no good, so try to de-normalize it.
- Fasting helps your body clean itself up, so work micro-fasts into your daily routine.
- Instead of exercising too much or too little, we should incorporate movement into our daily lives.
- Make walking and strength training part of your everyday life.
- Proper sleep is good for your mental and physical health.
- To improve your sleep, immerse yourself in darkness and follow a bedtime routine.
- Final summary
