Lifestyle Medicine
Empowering The Whole You
Lifestyle medicine is a growing field that emphasizes the use of evidence-based therapeutic interventions—primarily focused on nutrition, exercise, stress management, sleep, avoiding risky substances, and encouraging supportive interpersonal relationships—to prevent, treat, and reverse chronic diseases. At its core, it is about taking control of your health by making informed, sustainable lifestyle choices.
Lifestyle Medicine uses evidence-based, therapeutic interventions to improve whole-health through six pillars.
Eat Whole Foods, Mostly Plants
Move Your Body Daily
Get Restorative Sleep
Connect with Others
Positively Manage Stress
Avoid Risky Substances
By focusing on these six pillars of health our board-certified Lifestyle Medicine practitioners can help you prevent, treat, and reverse disease.
Our Unique Approach
- Non-Judgemental, Expert Advice – We compassionately meet you where you are to provide expert, ecidence-based advice, and the strategies to implement it, tailored to your unique life circumstances.
- Patient-Driven Goal Setting – We work collaboratively with you to decide the health goals to pursue and develop specific, actionable steps to achieve them.
Available Programs
At Trinity Health, we offer two robust program options for Lifestyle Medicine at our Ann Arbor Hospital Campus and through our IHA Medical Group. Learn more to find out which program is right for you:
FAQs
- Addresses Root Causes: At its core lifestyle medicine seeks to address the root causes of diseases—primarily lifestyle choices—to enact real change, promote health and in some cases, decrease the need for medications or other medical interventions.
- Promotes Active Patient Involvement: Lifestyle Medicine empowers patients to take an active role in their health, working alongside their healthcare team to craft and maintain healthy living strategies.
- Takes a Long-term Approach: Lifestyle Medicine emphasizes long-term solutions that foster ongoing health and well-being. We focus on optimizing both lifespan and health span to increase your ability to maintain independence, autonomy, and vitality well into your elder years. We want to support you in: “Adding years to your life, and life to your years”.
Lifestyle, complementary, integrative and functional medicine all focus on comprehensively supporting whole person health.
Lifestyle medicine prevents, treats, and reverses illness, through evidence-based lifestyle habit change, the foundation of health and wellness.
Complementary medicine includes evidence-based therapies such as acupuncture, yoga, massage, and chiropractic that may be used alongside conventional care.
Integrative medicine carefully coordinates evidence-based complementary therapies into a conventional treatment plan.
Functional medicine includes elements of complementary, integrative and lifestyle medicine but also incorporates supplements and a wide range of laboratory testing.
Lifestyle medicine is for any patient who is motivated to engage with long-term behavior change to prevent, treat and manage chronic illness while optimizing their overall health and longevity. Patients interested in feeling empowered to take charge of their health through evidence-based, root cause solutions are the perfect fit for Lifestyle Medicine programs.
Whole foods are those that are minimally processed (think apple or apple sauce vs apple flavored cereal). Plant-forward refers to a dietary focus on foods like vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes (beans and lentils), nuts, and seeds. We emphasize a dietary pattern instead of a diet to acknowledge that it is the long term, regular consumption of a variety of whole, plant foods that promotes well-being.
This way of eating can be summed up as “eat real food, mostly plants.”
While there are conflicting messages about nutrition in the media, the scientific evidence (and consensus) is clear: eating whole, plant foods promotes longevity, is good for the planet, and can prevent, treat and reverse disease.
Each program has unique billing policies. Please select the program you’re interested in from the table above for more details.
Each program has unique referral policies. Please select the program you’re interested in from the table above for more details.
The American College of Lifestyle Medicine is the professional organization, and certifying body, for all Lifestyle Medicine practitioners. They are a comprehensive resource for the evidence supporting the field of Lifestyle Medicine.