Award winning lifestyle coach Luke Coutinho explains four pillars of living healthy life

Award winning nutritionist, specialising in the field of integrative and lifestyle medicine, Luke Coutinho on Saturday, marked his presence at a LIVE session on the Facebook page of Sports Authority of India to discuss how a person's fitness is dependent on the lifestyle he/she maintains and how it can be improved.

Mr. Coutinho's speech revolved around his holistic mantra of the four pillars of leading a good and healthy life, which he described are balanced nutrition, adequate exercise, quality sleep, and emotional detox. He goes on explaining that in human body, immune system work for itself and sends them messages which acts like indicators of what to do and where to stop. "The immune system is designed at an optimum level so to strengthen it we need the right amount of sleep, exercise, balanced nutrition and mental calmness," says Coutinho. "Our body tells us when to stop eating but we often tend to overeat, similarly it tells us when to stop exercising, but we overdo it often thinking of achieving goals. If we wake up in the morning and still feel sleepy, that's the body tells us that we are sleep deprived. These are the signals we should be listening to," adds Coutinho.

The expert further goes on to break down the four pillars of a healthy life one after another. To highlight the importance of nutrition he mentions that nutrition is not dependent on what we eat but how our body reacts to what we eat. "If can still fall sick if you have strong immunity, but in that case, you will recover quickly, without heavy medications. A person with weak immune system will require more time to recover and need more medications. Every time we fall sick our immune system gets stronger. Our immune system develops anti-body and that's how a vaccination works," Coutinho explains. There are three important ways to ensure we are getting the right nutrition - firstly, we have to chew our food as digestion starts in the mouth. secondly, the diet has to be wholesome with all the nutrients, and thirdly, the food synergy.

Then he moves on to explain the importance of exercising and how by overdoing it and not doing it at all might affect a person's immune system. "We need to give time between exercise for muscles to heal. If we stress ourself with exercising, it might further damage our immunity and make us unhealthy. Most of the people are staying indoors now, but still they have to be active. Amid lockdown, we can be active and count our steps by walking, do exercises like pull-ups, push-ups, etc. Exercising twice a day amid the lockdown will help us with blood movement, which is necessary to keep our immune system sturdy," says Coutinho. One of the major aspects of immunity is sleep. It has been proved that sleep deprivation reduces immunity strength by 60-70 per cent. "Compromising our sleep for everything else has affected us, we have to plan our day so that we don't compromise our sleep," says Coutinho.

"Sleep is a natural drug that repairs your body and we have to make sure at any cost we are getting the required sleep," he adds.

He concludes, saying that our lifestyle is making us a depressed country. He explains we have to let things go and stop stressing out and probably meditate or practice yoga to stay calm. We can't hark upon social media or any news that cause us distress and train our mind to find peace. These are the aspects which are necessary to lead a good healthy life.