FirstLine Therapy is a physician-supervised approach to implementing simple lifestyle changes that can dramatically improve your overall health. The therapeutic lifestyle you’ll learn in FirstLine Therapy integrates food choices and preparation with physical activity and stress management to enhance your well-being, alleviate symptoms, help prevent chronic disease, and give you greater control of your health.
At its core, FirstLine Therapy is a lifestyle modification program. What makes the program different from others is that weight loss is often a secondary benefit to the primary goal of helping you achieve and maintain a healthy body composition (lean muscle-to-fat ratio) to improve health, manage disease, feel better, and reduce your risk for serious conditions.
Designed by health care professionals, FirstLine Therapy has been shown to be remarkably successful in helping people return to a path of extended health.
How Does it Work?
One of the most powerful tools for controlling the aging process and restoring vitality is to improve body composition by increasing muscle and improving hydration to body cells. The foods you eat, the way you manage stress, and your level of physical activity work together to significantly change your body composition for the better.
If FirstLine Therapy is an option for you, your physician will refer you to a lifestyle educator who will work with you to develop a customized set of guidelines that will help you think about food and physical activity in a more positive way. Nutritional support through prescribed supplements is often a part of the plan. Depending on your reasons for using FirstLine Therapy, your progress will be measured by your changing body composition and lab values, but most importantly by how you feel.
The goal is for these initial steps to bring about changes in the way you live your life, so that you can maintain on your own once your goals are met. How, why, and what you eat becomes an integrated part of the way you live, as does physical activity. Stress management becomes second nature. FirstLine Therapy starts in a clinic, but ends with you taking control over your health and wellness.
What Can You Expect?
What is a typical day like for you? As part of the initial FirstLine Therapy consultation, your healthcare provider will ask questions about your lifestyle, diet, physical activity, stress levels, and any current symptoms and how they affect you. Based on your body composition, you’ll work with the healthcare provider to devise a food plan that’s easy to follow and effective for your needs. Often, supplements are recommended, and they’ll be discussed in detail during the consultation. You may have questions about the choices you’ll be making and about how you’re feeling as you integrate FirstLine Therapy into your routine. Your healthcare provider will help you along the way.
Health Benefits
While many people use FirstLine Therapy to achieve healthy weight loss, your approach can also address other conditions. For example, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has stated that lifestyle changes are the most successful and cost-effective way to manage high cholesterol. FirstLine Therapy can also help patients address high blood pressure, blood sugar dysregulation, food sensitivities, chronic fatigue, depression and anxiety, chronic pain, inflammatory conditions, and fibromyalgia.
At WholeHealth Chicago, FirstLine Therapy is supervised by physicians. You’ll want to communicate openly about any medical condition you have or symptoms that arise once you begin the program. Pregnant or nursing women, people with a strong family history of certain medical conditions, and patients currently taking medications and/or supplements should share this information so that the therapeutic lifestyle program can be optimally designed.
Marla Feingold
Be well,
David Edelberg, MD