1. Improve Personal, Population and Planetary Health (IP3H) for all

The World Health Organization declared 2020 as the Decade of Health Action to achieve the sustainable development goals by 2030. This declaration aims to mobilize everyone everywhere into a movement for these goals, demand urgency and ambition to take action, and supercharge ideas into scalable solutions.

The 2019 Lancet Commission report is aligned with the WHO declaration. This report is about the global syndemic of obesity, undernutrition, and climate change. It addresses the interconnected challenges about how to improve personal, population and planetary health (IP3H) concurrently. Without comprehensive plans to improve the health of the planet, equity strategies aimed at improving personal and population health will particularly fail low-income families, marginalized groups and vulnerable people.

Poor nutrition and lack of exercise are the key drivers for lifestyle diseases. The EAT–Lancet Commission addresses the need to feed a growing global population a healthy diet while also defining sustainable food systems that will minimize damage to our planet. A holistic approach to health and well-being is essential for aligning leadership mindsets to IP3H for greater good of all. 

The Lancet Journal, Planetary Health, take a systems science approach in addressing the demise of environment, worsening air pollution and water quality, global warming and unhealthy food production practices. The RSA talk, There is no Planet B, and the book, Eat for the Planet, provide strategies and ideas about mobilizing people against the negative interactional effects of so-called wicked or complex problems related to planetary demise.  

The animal farm factories for mass meat production are toxic to the atmosphere and to the environment. Animal farm factories consume 40% of the world’s grain that could otherwise be consumed by humans. They produce 65% of nitrous oxide released into the atmosphere. Nitrous oxide is nearly 300 more times toxic to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide. They produce 37% of methane gas released into atmosphere. Methane is than 23 times more toxic to the ozone layer than carbon dioxide. They produce 18% of carbon dioxide release toward global warming. In contrast, transportation contributes 13.5%.

The 2019 deliberate setting of fires in the Amazon forest to expand beef production highlighted the ignorance about how mass meat production and consumption are major contributing causes to the planetary demise and the climate emergency. This catastrophe calls for designing strategies to reverse these trends. 

Individually focused healthcare interventions have had no IP3H impact. But why is that? This answer is simple. Healthcare was never designed to deliver social interventions for addressing inter-connected problems concurrently. 

Given our unhealthy planet, its toxic environments and the climate emergency, the IP3H leadership initiative is a monumental challenge. How can healthcare systems and educational organizations flourish in opening and aligning leadership mindsets to develop synergy between transformational strategies and social innovations for the greater good of all? 

To IP3H, transformational leaders create ecological complex process innovations operating synergistically at macro, meso and micro-levels. They begin this process by transforming their mindsets and enhancing their own sense of healthy well-being. Personal transformation precedes systemic transformation.

To synergistically amplify personal and systemic transformations, leaders deliberately design systems to facilitate personal transformation at scale. They help people become leaders in facilitating these transformational processes.

IP3H is the transformational driver to cultivate healthy cultures for reducing health inequities. The spearhead strategy is a whole food plant-based (WFPB) lifestyle, as described in Dean Ornish’s book UnDo It.

Invite everyone to take an IP3H step for humanity, the planet and the climate, by eating one extra WFPB meal per week over 3 months, without advocating for veganism and vegetarianism. This strategy calls for building on and expanding beyond the Eat for the Planet movement.

To build the IP3H movement, we need to design scalable peer health coaching platforms to promote WFPB lifestyles and the full spectrum of healthy habits. Health coach buddies is just one example of a scalable social innovation.

Unleashing the butterfly effect is essential for launching the IP3H movement. The butterfly effect is about designing cascades of small changes that have amplified impacts over time. This calls on leaders from all walks of life to address how corrupt corporate power subverts US food policies to perpetuate the negative health, environmental and climate change impacts of the #StandardAmericanDiet (SAD) globally. The #FoodFixBook addresses how to #IP3H.

We need thousands of butterflies to overcome the top ten reasons for why our political leaders, policy-makers and healthcare systems fail to promote IP3H concurrently.  These reasons related to closed-mindedness, rigid mindsets, ignorance about fake patriot personality disorder and the failure to understand the systemic complexities and the interacting effects of wicked problems on health and well-being.

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?Excerpt from book-in-progress, Health Coach Buddies: Improve your health and well-being as you help others. A leadership initiative for building peer network power to launch IP3H movement.

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Curious to learn more about IP3H

This blog series addresses the macro, meso and micro strategies for building the network power needed to launch the IP3H movement. This calls for connecting leaders within and across organizations to align leadership mindsets to IP3H. This top-down leadership initiative is essential for accelerating the implementation of professional and social learning opportunities to build the IP3H movement.

This strategy is essential for mobilizing the social capital to scale up the IP3H movement and help reduce inequities due to unhealthy lifestyles. Health coach buddies (reciprocal peer coaching) is just one prototype of a scalable social innovation to IP3H.

Leaders align mindsets to design transformational systems

Systemic transformation facilitates personal transformation, and vice versa.

1. Improve personal, population and planetary health concurrently IP3H are the co-attractors and drivers for cultivating healthy cultures.

2. Why leaders fail to lead systemic re-design. The greatest psychological barriers to IP3H are the constraints and mal-alignment of leadership mindsets.

3. How to expand leadership mindsets to systems, design and complexity thinking and overcome the limitations of reductionistic thinking, randomized controlled trials and evidence-based medicine. 

4. How leaders can catalyze transformation. We need our educational leaders to develop age-appropriate lifestyle curricula and learning platforms for all children and adults with the vision of building the network power to launch the IP3H movement.

5. Design peer health innovation hubs and ecosystems. To reverse health inequities, the epidemics of unhealthy habits, the mounting burdens of chronic diseases and the demise of our planet, we need to design peer health innovation (PHI) hubs that create scalable coaching, learning and support innovations (such as health coach buddies) to IP3H.

Leaders lead with personal and systemic transformations

1. Get a health coach buddy (HCB) to make deep change. Working together with a HCB, you will learn how develop your own personal evidence about making deep change that overcomes the limitations of evidence-based guidelines.

2. Use the health coach buddy principles. Five principles enable health coach buddies to collaborate and learn more effectively in working together.

3. Use the health coach buddy guidelines. The guidelines provide peers with ideas about what not to say and what to say during their HCB sessions.

4. What does healthy well-being means to you? Healthy well-being is a dynamic lifelong learning process and not a static definition, like the WHO definition of health. 

5. How can you manage stress better to reduce strain? Stress and strain management skills are essential to IP3H. These skills begin by starting with yourself before helping your family, community and the planet.

6. How would you describe your attitude toward your sleep? Good quality sleep is essential for improving your healthy well-being and for preventing psychological symptoms: foggy brain, low energy, reduced impulse control, impaired attention, focus, concentration, memory and performance, increased irritability, anger, anxiety and depressed moods, and reduced pain threshold.