By Brian Morris, MD

A reason why conventional diets fail is that they provide nutritional advice with tunnel vision—in complete isolation from other lifestyle factors. For example, one diet may instruct you to change one aspect of how you eat, such as limiting certain carbohydrates, without considering the impact of other habits such as exercise, sleep, and stress. Practicing a healthy lifestyle needs to involve all aspects of your life—from eating to exercising to sleeping to your relationships to your spiritual practice. The hard truth is that we are doomed to failure if the focus is solely on nutrition. Nutrition is often a reflection of how a person’s life is going. During times of stress or unhappiness, we often turn to comfort food and most diets ignore all of the other factors that affect how we eat.

Diets also typically try to find a gimmick to distinguish themselves. For example, one book tells you to eat more whole grains. Another book instructs you to avoid whole grains and focus on lean proteins. Another book claims that fruits and vegetables are the key to a long life. A different book tells you that the key is to combine your foods in certain ratios for optimal health.

These gimmicky programs rarely lead to a successful lifelong healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle that supports wellness is an interdependent process where nutrition, exercise, sleep, stress, spirituality, personal relationships, work relationships, community relationships, and many other factors work together to promote health and longevity. All of these factors impact one another in either a positive or negative way. Life does not operate in a vacuum. True wellness comes from moving past the “diet” mentality and embracing a more comprehensive mindset. Start thinking of life as an interdependent world where each action leads to a reaction and so on and so on. The goal is to think of your lifestyle as a code or a way of life where you gradually shift your habits in a healthier direction.