Following is a transcript of Rob's 'New Health Language' video:

Hi Health Creators – my name’s Rob. I’m out on Box Hill today, just a stone’s throw away from our office, and today I want to talk to you about the blueprint. I already mentioned it in last week’s Heartbeat video, but today we’re talking specifically about one aspect of the blueprint: the need for a common language when it comes to managing your health.

What’s the sustainable health blueprint?

So what’s the blueprint project really about? Well, it’s a really ambitious project that’s about how we – the people – with the help of different health, fitness and other professionals, can create an entirely new approach to how we manage our health. It’s about taking us from disease management to health creation.

To do that, one of the most important things we need is a common language that everyone can use. That’s not just a language that you understand, but also one that any health or fitness professional you choose to guide you on your health journey – regardless of their modality – can also understand. It’s not much use if the only people who speak your language are your right-up-to-the-minute nutritional and lifestyle practitioners who’re living on the leading edge of lifestyle medicine. If you decide to see a mainstream allopathic doctor or an acupuncturist, you also need a language that they can understand.

And, since exercise is so crucial to good health, why lock out fitness coaches from this language?

What’s the difference between health care, health creation and disease prevention? 

The blueprint is what we call an upstream system; get as close as you can to the source of the problem at the earliest possible stage of someone’s life – and have access to a collaboration of health and fitness professionals that all understand the same language so they can help you unpick things before they turn into serious diseases – way downstream, in the latter stages of your life. Why spend your twilight years in a state of disease when you could still be enjoying life to the full!

The bottom line is that if we carry on just focusing on disease we’re not going to stem the rising tide of preventable chronic and autoimmune diseases that are at risk of collapsing healthcare systems around the globe.

To illustrate this, think of your body as a car. If you just drive it around, neglect any maintenance schedule, don’t care about what fuel you put in – one day your car is going to break down on the side of the road with some major issues, and it’s going to take a lot of time and money to get it back on the road. That’s not sustainable, so most of us decide we’re going to get our cars checked and serviced regularly. Yet our current health systems just aren’t set up to do the same thing when it comes to managing our most important asset – our health!

As you can hopefully see, this kind of approach is a bit more sophisticated than the typical top-down policy measures that governments have been throwing at us that go under the banner of ‘disease prevention.’ People need to be empowered and informed so they can be in the driving seat of their own health – and the starting point is this idea of a common or universal language. The one we use is built on the foundation of ecology – because, as human beings, we are complex living organisms living and interacting in a dynamic environment – both internally and externally – one that we’ve evolved alongside over eons.  

Where can you find out more?

The next steps for our blueprint project is putting it all to the test – setting up trials in different settings and in different communities – and seeing how it fares, what it does to health outcomes, whether it saves money because you deal with problems at a much earlier stage – and ultimately – if it works at scale.

If you want to find out more, or you’d like to get involved in any way – as a citizen or as a practitioner, whether you’re a health, lifestyle or fitness professional, please subscribe to our brand new channel and give this video a thumbs up.  There’ll be loads more content coming your way now that Ellen, our full-time videographer and comms specialist, has joined our team!

Talk to you next week in our next Heartbeat vlog.