{"id":1936,"date":"2014-09-10T14:14:00","date_gmt":"2014-09-10T18:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.willclower.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/adapt-and-adopt-translating-a-healthy-culture-into-a-corporate-culture-of-health.html"},"modified":"2016-09-19T11:21:46","modified_gmt":"2016-09-19T15:21:46","slug":"adapt-and-adopt-translating-a-healthy-culture-into-a-corporate-culture-of-health","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=1936","title":{"rendered":"Adapt and Adopt: Translating a Healthy Culture into a Corporate Culture of Health"},"content":{"rendered":"

Follow @willclower<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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\"shutterstock_80499238-1\"<\/a>Principles apply across condition. One principle for any business is that it is easier to adapt an existing successful business model than to reinvent the wheel and hope it turns out as well as the thing that already works. In other words, \u201cfind success \u2026 do that.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n
For our weight and health, the same principle holds true. There are entire cultures that (unlike us) have low weight, healthy hearts and longer lives. In other words, a successful dietary model exists already, with millions of people living their healthy lifestyle every day. If we do what they do, we would get their results.<\/span><\/div>\n
However, instead of adapting and adopting their success like any good corporate strategy would advise, we have chosen to reinvent the wheel for over 40 years now with diets including the low carb, low fat, food combining, cave man, blood type, cabbage soup, and on and on.<\/span><\/div>\n
The list is embarrassingly long, and made doubly so by their persistent failure to make a dent in the problem.<\/span><\/div>\n

Adapt and Adopt<\/span><\/h2>\n
The dietary habits of the Mediterranean region are of the healthiest on Earth. The people are healthier and thinner, with fewer cases of heart disease, diabetes and obesity. But\u2014even better\u2014they didn\u2019t get this way by following the diet d\u2019jour<\/em> but by living the lifestyle, they\u2019ve enjoyed for centuries.<\/span><\/div>\n
Like any corporation, however, translating another\u2019s success to your own wildly variable circumstance is tricky. And the same thing holds true for the Mediterranean diet: we don\u2019t live there; our employees don\u2019t have 2\u00bd hours to eat their lunch; we don\u2019t have fresh markets on every corner or five weeks of mandatory vacation every year. Yes, they are living a healthy lifestyle\u2014but how do we make that work for us?<\/span><\/div>\n
1)      adopt the principles that make it successful, and<\/span><\/div>\n
2)      adapt those for our employees.<\/span><\/div>\n

Principles for a Healthy Culture of Health<\/span><\/h2>\n
Principle #1:<\/u> \u201cEat Food.\u201d This basic of the Mediterranean lifestyle avoids dietary minutia, and keeps participants from wringing their hands over the carbs in their baguettes, points are in their potatoes or calories when they take a walk. Micromanaging molecules \u2014 whether calories or carbs, points or proteins \u2014is the very definition of a diet and is not practiced by any healthy culture. None of them.<\/span><\/div>\n
Principle #2:<\/u> If it ain\u2019t food, don\u2019t eat it. Communicating this principle in the break room, lunchroom, and on vending machines encourages employees to eat real food, not synthetics (that\u2019s sugar, not non-nutritive artificial sweeteners; olive oil, not hydrogenated oil; bread, not \u201cwonder\u201d bread; and vegetables, not supplements). Even in America, we can adopt the Mediterranean habit of choosing items that are real food, made with real ingredients.<\/span><\/div>\n
Principle #3:<\/u> Learn to (actually) love food again. We have be coached by our culture to think that if you love your food, you eat it big and you eat it fast (think \u201cMan versus Food\u201d). But no healthy culture thinks this way. For them, the love of food is less about the quantity eaten and more about the quality of the food.<\/span><\/div>\n
Finally, a key principle to the Mediterranean lifestyle is to return to the family table. Americans used to practice this just as regularly as other cultures do now, but we have somehow forgotten it. And this is too bad, because the research is clear. When people eat at a table with people they enjoy, food quality increases as high-volume consumption decreases in the process, so you control calories and so control weight.<\/span><\/div>\n

These principles are a win, win, win, especially because they are practiced by successful cultures. This lowers risk and increases the chances that you can create a healthy culture of health.<\/span><\/span>

<\/span>For more information: Click here to visit Will Clower’s website. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Follow @willclower Principles apply across condition. One principle for any business is that it is easier to adapt an existing successful business model than to reinvent the wheel and hope … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[494,285],"tags":[314,290],"class_list":["post-1936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-mediterranean-diet","tag-corporate-wellness","tag-overweight"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7Qv5g-ve","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1858,"url":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=1858","url_meta":{"origin":1936,"position":0},"title":"The Happiness Experiment and Second-hand Stress","author":"Will Clower","date":"January 7, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"This is a fun article\u00a0on the nature of happiness working the workweek versus the weekend.\u00a0The author is something of a nerd (love that) with great perspective for getting more happiness into your weekday. 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Interesting, too, that those who live a lifestyle close to this pattern tend, statistically, to have a reduced risk of getting\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Articles"","block_context":{"text":"Articles","link":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?cat=494"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2399,"url":"https:\/\/www.mymedwellness.com\/blog\/?p=2399","url_meta":{"origin":1936,"position":2},"title":"Health Care Reform and Corporate Wellness – Compensation Today","author":"Will Clower","date":"April 27, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"What the new healthcare legislation means for corporate wellness. 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