On a recent episode of the Hurdle Podcast, host Emily Abate sat down with Dr. Jonathan Leary, a functional medicine expert and founder of LA’s newest hotspot, Remedy Place, to talk about the difference between maintaining health vs. extreme health ‘hacks’, small things you can do to improve your health, and why mindful movement trumps all. 

Maintaining health vs. extreme diets and workouts: 

On the pod, Dr. Leary noted that health is really about adopting lifelong habits that have a positive cumulative effect. Whether it’s committing to drinking an extra glass of water each day, or putting an extra serving of greens on your plate, healthy habits should be small things that can be done forever. 

Developing Life-long Habits:

When deciding where to start in your own personal health journey, he offered the following personal query:  

“What can you do for the rest of your life?”

He followed that, “there should never be a diet that you’re going to do for a month or three months.”

Instead, he recommended asking:

“What are those nutritional changes that you’re going to make—and grow to love—because it’s also about the psychological perspective of loving what you’re doing.”

Two small things you can do to improve your health:

  • Hydration: “If you’re dehydrated, digestion is going to be off, energy is going to be off, and if you have an ache, pain or tightness, it’s going to be worsened. It’s correlated to everything.”
  • Intermittent fasting: On the pod, Dr. Leary noted that this doesn’t work for everyone, but as a whole, if you condense the time that you eat (e.g. eating within a eight hour window) it will help to give your digestive system a break to heal, decrease inflammation, and help to improve your immune system. 

How to be 1% healthier?

Move in a way that makes your body feel better not worse. On the pod, Dr. Leary noted that, “movement cures.”

He followed that:

“Whatever you’re doing for your exercise should fix the body and not break it…You don’t need to be strong and powerful, you need to be functional and pain free.”