Health & Wellbeing
Wellbeing at the tip of mine worker’s fingers NUTRITIONAL MEDICINE PRACTITIONER, MICHELE CHAVELLEY HEDGE, REVEALS THE KEYS TO A GOOD LIFESTYLE. THE GOOD NEWS IS, THEY’RE NOT AS HARD AS SOME MIGHT THINK.
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taying healthy requires the same focus, on and off a mine site. Michele Chavelley Hedge, a nutritional medicine practitioner who comes from a family of blue-collar workers, says there are only three key principles to embracing a healthier lifestyle. And none of them paint an extreme scenario. “The reason a lot of people don’t embrace a healthier lifestyle is because they think it’s going to require such a big lifestyle change,” Hedge tells Safe to Work. “They think they won’t be able to have coffee, they won’t be able to have wine. That’s not the case at all. There are lots of levels to a person’s health. My philosophy is to never take an extreme approach.” Mine employees can start by focussing on the three main things. The first one involves eating real whole foods that are unpackaged and unprocessed as often as possible. Real whole foods are preferred because they’re high in vitamins, minerals and fibre – all the components that contribute to a person’s good mental and gut health.
Michele Chavelley Hedge prescribes a no-extreme approach to a healthy diet.
“When someone’s eating real whole foods, I want them to think about having a bit of good carbs, a bit of good fat and a bit of protein,” the author of three books says. “They should start thinking about those three different components in their meals. Once people start eating like that, all of a sudden they stop becoming the sugar muncher. “They stop becoming the mad binger or mad craver because by eating real whole foods, they send chemical messages to the brain that says they’re satiated. They’re satisfied.” Hedge recognises that in the real world, people do live a busy lifestyle. The working mother of three admits she doesn’t always manage to eat real whole
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food in every meal. But one can opt for the simplicity in avoiding as much processed and packaged food as possible. The second principal to a healthy diet is to limit the amount of intake of added sugar, Hedge says. Excluding the sugar found in fruits and vegetables, snacks such as muesli bars and yoghurt disguise themselves as healthy food, but are in reality packed with an abundant amount of added sugar. “A high intake of added sugar can lead to all sorts of physical and mental health complication,” Hedge, whose recipes and wellness programs can be found on her website called ‘A Healthy View’, says.
