How to translate a healthy culture into your culture of health.
Here’s what I love about the Mediterranean approach to Wellness. In my conversations, interactions, and sit-down interviews with people of this region, it’s clear that this doesn’t come from a book, the moving goal posts of dietary guidelines, or revolving door of diet fads.
It comes from their culture. It is truly not what they do. It’s who they are. And that matters, because those cultural habits lead to some of the healthiest lifestyles on earth.
So yes, this cultural approach to wellbeing works and has worked for centuries. The question is, how do you translate their healthy culture in your our workplace culture of heath.
Option 1: We all go in together on a villa in sunny southern Spain (I’ll perfect my paella, I promise!).
Option 2: Assuming you guys have lives and family and other normal things like that, the only other way I can see to do that is through a principles-based approach.
Distill out what makes it work for them, and then apply that on our side of the Atlantic. And although there are many principles, the one people want to talk most about is food selection.
What can I eat!?!?
First Principles of Mediterranean Wellness
They eat carbs in their pastas and pitas, full fat cheeses in their fetas and parms, and have wine with the meal. But here’s the key. Everything they do eat is a real food.
It was alive at some point.
It had a mamma and a daddy.
It was part of the food chain, not invented in a lab with a shelf life approaching that of steel belted radials.
And yes, you do have to eat in control because if you approach everything like Cookie Monster at an Chips Ahoy convention, you’ll make those very same deliciously healthy foods bad for you. But, for now let’s just start with food selection. When asking yourself how to eat according First Principles of Mediterranean Wellness, the answer is “Eat Food. If it’s not food, don’t eat it.”
