At Kettering Health, our lifestyle medicine program partners with each patient’s primary care provider to deliver a coordinated, whole-person care plan focused on achieving meaningful goals.

Why Choose Lifestyle Medicine?

Our lifestyle medicine program is for patients who want more time with their healthcare team to explore nutrition, sleep, physical activity, and other lifestyle behaviors.

Our providers are certified by the American College of Lifestyle Medicine, and they live the pillars of lifestyle medicine themselves. With this team, each patient’s experience is personalized around their own goals.

Who Can Benefit?

Lifestyle medicine is a good fit if you are:

• Interested in building a healthier life
• Managing a long-term condition such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, or heart disease
• Trying to prevent a condition that runs in your family
• Working to lower your cancer risk or protect your long-term brain and heart health
• Looking for whole-person care that treats your body, mind, and spirit together

Lifestyle medicine works alongside your current treatment. It does not replace your medicine, and you should never stop a prescription on your own. As your habits change, your provider may be able to lower some doses over time.

How Our Program Works

Before Your First Visit

You will get a phone call before your first appointment. Someone from the team will walk you through how the program works, what to expect, and what to bring, so nothing is a surprise when you arrive.

Your First Appointment

Your first visit is 60 minutes with a lifestyle medicine provider. You will talk through your health history, your current conditions and medicines, and your health goals.

Before you leave, three things happen:

• You meet your health coach.
• You and your provider write down your first goals.
• You schedule your one-week follow-up with your health coach and your three-month follow-up with your provider.

Working With Your Health Coach

Your health coach is the person you see most. They meet with you regularly to check on your goals, work through what is getting in the way, and adjust the plan as your life changes.

This is where most of the progress happens. Habits change between appointments, not during them.

Your Wider Care Team

Depending on your goals, you may also meet with:

• A registered dietitian, for practical help with food, cooking, and shopping
• An exercise physiologist, for a movement plan built around your body and your limits
• A chaplain, for support with meaning, purpose, and the spiritual side of health

Group Sessions

You will be invited to group visits, also called shared medical appointments. Each session focuses on one of the six pillars or on a timely health topic.

Group sessions give you two things a one-on-one visit cannot: more teaching time with a clinician, and other people working on the same things you are.

The Six Pillars of Lifestyle Medicine

The American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM) built the field around six pillars. Your care plan will touch all six, though you and your provider decide where to start.

• Nutrition: Eating patterns built mostly around whole, minimally processed, plant-forward foods. Your team helps you find a way of eating you can keep up, not a diet you abandon in six weeks.
• Physical Activity: Moving your body regularly in ways you can sustain. An exercise physiologist can help you start safely, even if you have joint pain, heart disease, or have not exercised in years.
• Restorative Sleep: Getting enough good sleep on a regular schedule. Poor sleep raises the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, depression, and weight gain.
• Stress Management: Learning to respond to stress in ways that protect your health. Long-term stress affects blood pressure, blood sugar, sleep, and immune function.
• Social Connection: Building and keeping meaningful relationships. Loneliness carries real health risk, and connection is treated here as part of your care, not a nice extra.
• Avoiding Risky Substances: Reducing or stopping tobacco, alcohol, and other substances that work against your health goals. Your team supports you without judgment.