Vicki D. answered • 06/13/24
M.A. in Counseling Psychology with 8+ Years as Mental Health therapist
Behavioral lifestyle counseling helps people make better lifestyle choices to prevent, manage, or improve chronic health conditions. These discussions would be around nutrition, fitness, behavior, and stress. Nutrition may include adequate and unpolluted water intake, whole, no processed foods, no drugs, few grains, and a high intake of vegetables. Fitness would require a minimum of 150 minutes/week of aerobic exercise with weight lifting. Behavior would minimize social media time, regular reading of positive-thinking books, having upbeat and healthy friends, fun hobbies, and a belief system that helps self-actuation, wisdom, and self-esteem to grow. The most important is managing stress. This can be maintained with adequate sleep and needed training and education for meaningful work. Prevention of stress can include establishing savings for emergencies, savings funds (such as Christmas) and for retirement, adequate health and life insurance, and keeping a well-managed budget.
