Taking Harvard's wellness course, I was surprised: it resonated with what I wrote in 1994

In 2026 I completed three Harvard Medical School Executive Education programmes: Health and Wellness: Designing a Sustainable Nutrition Plan (January), Lifestyle and Wellness Coaching (March 6) and Nutrition and Wellness Coaching (March 23).

I went in as a student. I came out pleasantly surprised.

Six pillars, five dimensions

The courses teach the six pillars of lifestyle medicine: nutrition, physical activity, sleep, stress management, relationships, and avoiding harmful substances. These pillars come from the American College of Lifestyle Medicine (ACLM), founded in 2004 and since adopted by Harvard Medical School and other leading universities.

In 1994 I had described a five-dimensional framework, later formalised as Uni5: physical, emotional, professional, personality, and social and consciousness wellness. My website, which went online in 1999, wrote about nutrition, movement, sleep, stress, relationships and purposeful living as one integrated whole.

“I was not looking for confirmation. I was surprised to find a fellow traveller, one who arrived ten years after me, by a different route.”

Where the two walk together, and where they part

The six pillars and the five dimensions clearly cover the same ground: the body, daily habits, stress and relationships. Lifestyle medicine has done important work in bringing this into clinics, with clear guidelines, behaviour-change methods and coaching frameworks.

Uni5 goes further into layers that clinical lifestyle medicine has not yet reached:

• why the five-element pattern appears across nature and biology;
• the root causes of resistance to lasting behaviour change;
• how personality determines which wellness approach works for a person;
• why professional misalignment shows up as physical illness;
• the role of social purpose and consciousness in individual healing.

A resonance, not a validation

I share this not to claim priority for its own sake, but because it encourages me. When two people start from different places, a cancer biologist in Madurai and a medical college in America, and arrive at the same territory, it suggests the territory is real.

The timeline is simple: Uni5 in 1994, ACLM in 2004, Harvard's adoption later still. The resonance is real. The work now is to carry it into people's lives, which is what 010FEET Wellness sets out to do.