Founder George Ohsawa created a holistic approach to health.

This approach integrates 7 essential qualities in life to enjoy the best health.

These combine:

1. Having plenty of energy, vitality, exercise, movement and activity. This might include yoga, qi gong, sports, dancing, walking and being in nature.
2. Enjoying a healthy diet of simple, natural foods. Ideally these would mostly be local, in season and in their natural state.
3. To benefit from a good, deep, restorative nights sleep. The aim would be to heal and repair well during sleep and to wake up feeling enthusiasm and vitality.
4. Developing and retaining a good memory. As our memories are naturally selective, this could include focussing on the memories that help our confidence, self esteem and happiness.
5. To enjoy healthy emotions. We can use meditation, mindfulness, consciouness and awareness to find greater peace, tranquility and ultimately happiness.
6. Positive thinking or a more recent term could be positive psychology. Learning to look for the joy in life, see the best in people, be solution orientated and apply ourselves constructively to be a positive influence on humanity and nature.
7. To develop a strong sense of appreciation and gratitude. Whilst this is easy when everything is well in our lives, the challenge is to retain our gratitude through difficult times, looking for how we can improve, develop and evolve along our journey in life.

I would add to enjoy a healthy social life and spend good quality time with family, friends and colleagues.

Although macrobiotics can appear to focus on food, and for sure food is an essential component in health, it needs the other areas to work well. For instance, without good sleep we eventually lose our health and healing ability. Without exercise, our muscles and bones will not develop fully. Similarly, in the Macrobiotic Survey of nearly 600 people, there was a strong association between, energy, digestion and healthy emotions. Also strong associations between optimism, movement and sleep. This all suggests that to create the best health we need to explore all areas of life and when working with others try to help them adopt new healthy habits in the areas of life they can best improve.

I have run a macrobiotic health coaching course since 2005 that uses these 7 conditions for health as the basis of the trainning. These have impressive results leading to a truely macro way to explore health and help other people achieve the same.

When we take the biggest view of health and wellbeing, often the changes to a macrobiotic lifestyle are simple, easy and achiveable. In the course we use the health coaching approach so that people can make simple, achieveable changes to their lives, that they are happy to take on and lead to the results they want. This includes using a series of small practical steps to achieve desired results.

Author, Simon Brown runs an online 1 year, annual macrobiotic course with Melanie Brown Waxman and Filipa Silva, that leads to becoming an accreditied macrobiotic health coach and cook with the Macrobiotic Association.

To contact Simon, simon@chienergy.co.uk

Website www.chienergy.co.uk