Reclaiming the Rhythm of Health, Intuition, and Longevity
A return to how you were designed to live
By Serena Poon, CN, CHC, CHN
As a culture, we have explored holistic medicine, functional medicine, integrative medicine, regenerative medicine… We’ve become masters at managing health but we’ve forgotten how to simply feel well.
Most of my clients came to me monitoring steps, counting calories, biohacking sleep, and tracking every metric. Yet they were exhausted, inflamed, disconnected from joy, and literally cut off from the intuitive rhythms that once guided them effortlessly, intuitively. Getting back to this is what I call lifestyle medicine.
Health is not something to be dictated. Health is something to remember. Because the body knows.
What does this mean? As a child, you moved because it felt good. You ate when you were hungry. You stopped when you were full. You played until your body asked you to rest. You went to sleep when your parents told you (generally when the sun went down) and not because a wearable pushed an alert, but because your body was in sync with a rhythm.
This was the original lifestyle medicine — and the most intuitive, evidence-backed path to healing and longevity that we have.
Today, we can reframe lifestyle medicine not as a checklist, but as a way of returning to how we were designed to live: rhythmically, intuitively, and joyfully.
What Is Lifestyle Medicine?
Lifestyle medicine is the use of evidence-based daily habits to prevent, treat, and reverse chronic disease. It focuses on:
- Nutrition
- Movement
- Restorative sleep
- Stress regulation
- Social connection
- Avoiding harmful substances like alcohol
But beyond science, lifestyle medicine in its truest, most healing form is a return to innocence, to trusting the inner cues you were born with and to letting your life become the prescription.
Let’s explore the 6 pillars through this lens of intuition, biology, and deep reconnection.
1. Nutrition
Children eat when they’re hungry. They stop when they’re full. They don’t moralize food, they respond to internal cues. This is not conjecture. Intuitive eating, as it’s called, a practice that honors hunger, satiety and satisfaction, is associated with lower body weight, healthier blood pressure, improved psychological well-being, and less disordered eating (1).
Combine this with a plant-forward, anti-inflammatory diet, and you get the power of nature and intuition working together. Diets rich in vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains, and healthy fats help lower inflammation, support detoxification, and protect against cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and cognitive decline (2).
Your body knows what nourishes it. Rebuilding that trust is the foundation of healing and longevity. Instead of counting, tracking, or restricting, try this:
- Eat when you’re truly hungry.
- Slow down, enjoy the flavors, textures and sensation of hunger abating.
- Remove distractions.
- Choose foods that are grown, not processed.
- Eat to feel alive, not controlled. Think about the energy you are deriving from your meal.
2. Movement
In childhood, movement was freedom, not punishment. It was joyful and unstructured. We climbed trees, rode bikes, danced in the living room, or explored the backyard until we felt tired. We didn’t “exercise.” We moved because it felt good.
Today, we know that daily movement reduces the risk of nearly every chronic disease. But the intention matters just as much as the action.
Movement should help you reconnect with your body. This in turn will enhance your mood and, consequently, help balance your hormones. Movement also helps reduce inflammation, and improves lymphatic and cardio health (3).
You don’t need a fitness tracker. You need to reclaim your sense of active play. Try joyful movement:
- Walk in the woods
- Stretch with music
- Ride a bike without tracking mileage
- Dance barefoot in your kitchen
- Explore a new city on foot
- Go hear live music with a friend
3. Sleep
As a child, your parents taught you to listen to your body to get the healing sleep your growing body (and brain) needed. You didn’t need a sleep app. You just slept because it was time.
Sleep is when healing happens. Deep sleep helps the brain detoxify via the glymphatic system, regulates hormones, boosts immunity, and supports emotional resilience (4). When you have trouble falling asleep or staying asleep, research tells us that you are at increased risk for obesity, depression, cardiovascular disease, and dementia.
The body knows when to sleep. Your job is to listen to your body… So instead of optimizing, try attuning:
- Go to bed when you’re sleepy — not when your phone tells you
- Enjoy a book instead a night in front of a screen
- Create a rhythm of rest, not just a routine
4. Stress Regulation
Stress isn’t just emotional — it’s deeply physiological. Chronic stress alters immune function, disrupts digestion, damages memory, and shortens telomeres (the markers of aging) (5).
But here’s where it gets real: you can’t access your intuition in survival mode. If you’re constantly in fight-or-flight, your body won’t prioritize growth, digestion, or healing.
Intuition lives in the body, not the brain alone. It depends on interoception, the ability to sense internal cues like hunger, fatigue, emotion, or tension. Interoception relies on a well-regulated nervous system, particularly on vagal tone, which reflects parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) activity (6).
When the body is in sympathetic dominance (fight, flight, or freeze), attention narrows, digestion halts, hormone production is deprioritized, and the immune system is suppressed. In this state, the brain’s resources are rerouted to focus on short-term survival, not subtle perception or inner guidance (7).
Under stress, the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis is activated, releasing cortisol and other stress hormones. This response is adaptive in short bursts, preparing the body to flee or fight, though it becomes damaging when prolonged (8).
Children feel stress too but they shake it off, cry it out, then fall asleep in the backseat. They let emotion move through them. Adults often suppress, override, or numb the effects of stress.
Your nervous system must feel safe to heal and to guide. To reconnect with the inner signal, create safety:
- Let yourself feel what’s actually happening
- As you are feeling it, breathe in slowly, relaxing your diaphragm, pause, then just as slowly expel your breath through your mouth
- Take a walk surrounded by nature
- Reiki or gentle touch is a bit more involved but is also an excellent way to realign your energy centers
5. Social Connection
Loneliness is now considered more harmful to health than smoking (9). We are social creatures and so we are biologically predisposed to feeling connected to others. Social interaction lowers cortisol, boosts immune function, improves cardiovascular health, and protects against early death.
As children, we didn’t network — we played. We connected because it was fun and felt good, not for social or professional advantage.. That energy heals. So to reclaim it, think about building relationships that allow vulnerability, play, emotional safety, laughter. Connection is lifestyle medicine, not another task.
6. No Alcohol: Remove What Numbs, Reclaim What’s Real
We live in a culture that normalizes numbing. But alcohol — even in moderation — impairs sleep, blunts emotion, weakens the immune system, and increases the risk of cancer and cognitive decline (10).
More importantly, it separates you from your inner wisdom. Removing alcohol isn’t about deprivation. It’s about choosing clarity, connection, and coherence.
Why Intuition Is the Underpinning of It All
The root of lifestyle medicine isn’t just behavior, it’s attunement. Your body knows what it needs, but it can’t get through when you’re distracted, depleted, or dependent on external validation.
Intuition is real. It’s housed in the gut-brain axis via the vagus nerve, the heart’s electromagnetic field, and the limbic brain, which processes emotion and resonance faster than conscious thought.
When you ignore your intuition, the result is chronic misalignment: insomnia, poor digestion, fatigue, anxiety, immune dysfunction, and a lingering sense that something is off.
When you restore it, healing unfolds naturally.
The Body Knows
You were born knowing how to be well. Before diet culture. Before devices. Before burnout and bypassing. You moved, rested, ate, connected, and healed without effort. That wisdom never left you. It just got paused, waiting to be reactivated.
Let lifestyle medicine be your way back to trusting, attuning, and thriving. Back to your original rhythm.
Because it’s waiting for you.
xo – Serena
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What’s the difference between intuition and impulse when it comes to food and lifestyle choices?
A: Intuition is a felt, internal sense based on your body’s needs, shaped by interoception and nervous system regulation. Impulse is often a reaction to external stimuli, emotional overwhelm, or a dysregulated state. For example, craving processed sugar at 3 p.m. may be a stress-related impulse, whereas feeling a need for warm, grounding food after a restless night could be intuition. The key difference is the nervous system state from which the desire arises. When your system is calm and grounded, intuitive cues are clearer and more trustworthy.
Q: If tracking helps me stay accountable, is it really bad?
A: Tracking isn’t inherently bad, it’s a tool. But it becomes problematic when it overrides your body’s cues. For many people, over-reliance on metrics leads to disconnection, anxiety, or compulsive behavior. If you feel empowered by tracking, use it in a flexible, non-punitive way. But if it’s replacing your ability to feel hunger, fatigue, or joy, it may be time to take a break and rebuild trust with your body.
Q: How do I start to rebuild intuition if I’ve been ignoring it for years?
A: Rebuilding intuition is less about trying harder and more about creating conditions for listening. Start by slowing down. Incorporate daily moments of stillness—meals without screens, walks without podcasts, journaling after rest. Focus on interoceptive practices like breathwork, body scans, or mindful movement. The more you create nervous system safety, the more clearly your intuition can emerge.
Q: Can I still use supplements and functional testing while practicing intuitive living?
A: Yes—and in fact, they can work beautifully together. Functional testing gives you helpful data, especially when recovering from illness. Supplements can support healing where the body is depleted. But the goal is always to return to internal balance, not to depend on external fixes indefinitely.
Q: I don’t feel “in tune” with my body at all. Is something wrong with me?
A: Not at all. In fact, disconnection is incredibly common, especially after years of chronic stress, trauma, restrictive dieting, or overworking. Intuition gets quieter when it’s ignored, but it doesn’t disappear. It’s still there, waiting for you to slow down and listen. In somatic therapy, this is referred to as “repatterning” the nervous system. With time, safety, and practice, your capacity for internal attunement can be restored.
Q: Are there cultures where this lifestyle medicine approach is still intact?
A: Yes. Many traditional and Indigenous cultures continue to live rhythmically, guided by natural cues and community connection rather than artificial schedules and productivity pressures. For example, daily movement, plant-based diets, rest, social bonding, and purpose (called ikigai in Okinawa) are core features of their lives. These aren’t trends; they’re ways of being that are rooted in thousands of years of embodied wisdom.
Q: What’s the role of spiritual practices like Reiki in this framework?
A: Reiki and other energy-based practices help bring awareness to the subtle body, where emotional and physical stress patterns often reside. These practices promote relaxation, parasympathetic activation, and subtle interoceptive awareness, making it easier to access intuition. While not a replacement for medical treatment, Reiki can complement lifestyle medicine by restoring energetic flow and emotional clarity, which many people lose in a high-stress, externally-driven world.
Q: Isn’t it a privilege to live this way?
A: It can feel that way in a culture that values productivity over presence. But reclaiming your health and rhythm doesn’t require wealth or time off work. It begins with micro-shifts: chewing slowly, stepping outside for two minutes, pausing before reacting. Lifestyle medicine is about accessibility and sustainability, not perfection. Even small steps toward alignment can have profound effects on health and emotional wellbeing.
Q: How do I balance intuitive living with real-world responsibilities like work, caregiving, and deadlines?
A: Intuition doesn’t ask you to abandon responsibility. It helps you navigate it more wisely. The goal isn’t to escape structure, but to choose it consciously. Instead of pushing through exhaustion, ask what would support your energy. Instead of multitasking meals, give yourself 10 uninterrupted minutes. When you live from attunement, you often become more efficient, more present, and more grounded in everything you do.
CITATIONS
- Hazzard VM, Telke SE, Simone M, Anderson LM, Larson NI, Neumark-Sztainer D. Intuitive eating longitudinally predicts better psychological health and lower use of disordered eating behaviors: findings from EAT 2010-2018. Eat Weight Disord. 2021 Feb;26(1):287-294. doi: 10.1007/s40519-020-00852-4. Epub 2020 Jan 31. PMID: 32006391; PMCID: PMC7392799.
- Diab A, Dastmalchi LN, Gulati M, Michos ED. A Heart-Healthy Diet for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention: Where Are We Now? Vasc Health Risk Manag. 2023 Apr 21;19:237-253. doi: 10.2147/VHRM.S379874. PMID: 37113563; PMCID: PMC10128075.
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- Alshak MN, Das JM. Neuroanatomy, Sympathetic Nervous System. [Updated 2023 May 8]. In: StatPearls [Internet]. Treasure Island (FL): StatPearls Publishing; 2025 Jan-. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK542195/
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