A short interview monologue (spoken by Kristi Hughes) reflecting on the development of lifestyle medicine. The speaker frames lifestyle medicine as a decade-long, pleasurable journey centered on patient empowerment and relationships — between patient and provider, patient and self, and patient and food/movement — and emphasizes teaching skills and guiding patients rather than giving advice.
Tell us about your journey on this whole revelational process. Well, it's definitely been a process, there's no question. And a journey, a pleasurable journey. As someone already commented, we were doing lifestyle medicine before it was called lifestyle medicine. I think that's a really interesting review. When we look back over this last decade. And if I were going to summarize lifestyle medicine in one most important term, I would use the words empowerment, empowerment for the patient, that it's a joy to be able to hand that loads of control back over the patient with knowledge. And it's an honor to be in a relationship with a patient. And I would state that's probably the second most important thing that's taking place in lifestyle medicine is everything is about relationship. It's relationship to self, it's relationship to your provider, your coach, your doctor. It's about your relationship to food, your relationship to want to move your body or not move your body. And so I would say empowering the patient, really encouraging them to come full circle and in a non demeaning way, to me it is so comparable to managing the transition of bringing a little person from 2 until 5 or 6. Because you have to teach skill sets, you have to teach ways in which that person will come to that discovery on their own. And they don't realize that it was a guide. You guided them to realize I want to eat more legumes in my diet, I need more color in my place, I need to get up and I need to move my body because it's the right thing for me. So to really bring yourself to the other side of the table and get out of the advice giving and the empowerment position, I think that's probably the greatest privilege of doing lifestyle medicine.
