How to Use Medical Marijuana for a Healthier Lifestyle

• Medical cannabis can support a wide variety of health goals—you can use cannabis for anxiety and other specific medical conditions or leverage the healing properties of marijuana for overall wellness improvements.
• Medical cannabis can help you improve your mental health, create healthy habits, maintain healthy nutrition, and relieve pain.
• Getting medical cannabis in Louisiana is relatively simple, especially if you partner with TeleLeaf. We can help you get your medical marijuana card ASAP.

Patients continue to uncover revolutionary results while using medical cannabis for anxiety, autoimmune support, and countless other medical conditions. Many patients discover that medical cannabis does more than help them manage their medical condition—it also supports overall wellness.

How, exactly, does cannabis support a healthy lifestyle? If you’ve been privy to mainstream media’s smear campaign against cannabis, you might be skeptical about its healing potential. Not to worry—we’re breaking it all down in this guide.

Below, we’ll dive into how medical cannabis can benefit your wellness in these areas in particular: mental health, healthy habits, nutrition, and pain relief. Even if you’re considering using cannabis for a separate condition, you’ll likely experience the benefits below (and many more) throughout your treatment journey.

Medical Cannabis and Wellness: What Marijuana Can Do for You

Let’s explore the four areas where you’re likely to unlock the most impressive results.

Supporting Mental Health

Mental health has been in the spotlight recently—therapy has become somewhat mainstream, creators are developing content specifically related to mental wellness, and people are looking for both pharmaceutical and all-natural support for a healthy mind.

Medical cannabis helps patients:

• Treat and recover from specific mental health conditions: People living with depression, anxiety, mood disorders, PTSD, and other conditions can leverage medical marijuana’s healing properties. While some strains make patients feel energized (a boon for people struggling with executive dysfunction or lethargy), others promote a sense of calm that helps patients slow down, process their emotions, and function in day-to-day life.
• Improve overall mental wellness: Even if you don’t live with a mental health condition, you can still reap the positive rewards of cannabis. Different strains produce unique effects, and you might find that a strain you’re already using (to treat another condition, perhaps) also helps you process events from your past, identify and resolve hangups, and maintain an overall level-headed state.

Looking to harness the mental health support potential of a strain you’re already using? Consider starting a journal that you intentionally use after a dose takes effect. Even processing the events of the day diary-style can help you unlock your analytical side.

Creating Healthy Habits

Starting a journal may prove to be a healthy habit for you—one of many you could create with help from medical cannabis.

While mainstream media often portrays “potheads” as lazy and unmotivated, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Although some strains do promote relaxation and drowsiness, others can actually improve focus and motivate patients to take action.

In fact, you might find that cannabis can specifically help you build healthy habits like:

• Working out: While cannabis may not improve your overall athletic performance, it might motivate you to work out. A recent study found that runners who used cannabis before workouts enjoyed their workouts more and showed more excitement about working out overall.
• Meditating: Since many strains invoke introspection and serenity, patients can use them to supplement a meditation routine. Even if you just take a few minutes to complete a full-body inventory once the effects of your cannabis dose kick in, you might discover a fulfilling new pastime in meditation.
• Socializing: There’s no doubt that social interactions are good for our mental health and overall wellness. But if you have trouble making conversation in groups (or live with the daily realities of social anxiety), you might benefit from more stimulating strains of cannabis. Patients generally report that sativa strains can make them feel energized, creative, and extroverted—effects you could leverage to benefit your social health.

Improving Nutrition

We know what you’re thinking: “Cannabis causes the munchies—how does eating a family-size bag of chips on the couch improve your nutrition?”

There are two myths to debunk here:

• Not all cannabis products cause munchies: There are hundreds of cannabis strains on the market today, and they all produce unique effects. Not all of them stimulate appetite, either.
• Weight loss isn’t a universal goal: Diet culture’s lies are as pervasive as myths about cannabis; While we’re conditioned to believe that weight loss always improves health, this certainly isn’t the case. For people enduring cancer treatment, recovering from surgery, or escaping the clutches of an eating disorder, weight gain and weight maintenance are perfectly normal goals.

Not to mention that, even if you are trying to lose weight, you can use the munchies to your advantage. Using an appetite-stimulating strain and keeping nutrient-dense foods at home might help you embrace healthier dishes, for instance. Crisp salads, fruit popsicles, and frozen blueberries always taste good when the munchies kick in.

Want to learn more about the interaction between cannabis and nutrition? Check out our full guide.

Relieving Pain

People have been using cannabis for pain relief for generations—because it works. And, unlike many pharmaceutical options, medical marijuana isn’t habit-forming and doesn’t pose a risk of overdose. (While you can certainly overconsume THC, you won’t risk your life; you may just feel a little disoriented and uncomfortable for a few hours.)

While patients widely leverage medical marijuana to manage chronic pain, cannabis can also relieve:

• Post-exercise soreness: Innovative products like topicals can help you target acute post-exercise soreness and recover in comfort. Goodbye delayed onset muscle soreness, hello leg day.
• Post-surgical pain: Many patients experience pain in the aftermath of a major surgery. Even if your pain is short-term, you can still use medical cannabis to find relief.
• Pain during ongoing medical treatment: If you’re trying to muscle through the pain during chemotherapy or radiation, there’s a better way—consider adding medical cannabis to your regimen to discover the relief you deserve.

While you can dive into our full guide to pain relief with medical marijuana, let’s touch on the basics. Cannabis works as a pain reliever because the cannabinoids found in marijuana products (primarily THC and CBD) interact with the body’s endocannabinoid system (ECS). The ECS is a network of receptors that play a role in pain signaling to the brain; when cannabinoids bind to or modulate ECS receptors, this may ease or stop pain signaling, reducing felt pain.

There’s certainly still research to be done to demystify the science, but in the meantime, trust the mountain of anecdotal reports: cannabis relieves pain, plain and simple.

How to Get Medical Cannabis in Louisiana and Beyond

If the information above has piqued your interest, you might be ready to explore your options with medical marijuana.

Can you access medical cannabis in Louisiana? Yes—all you have to do is:

• Schedule an appointment with a healthcare provider: In Louisiana, any licensed physician, nurse practitioner, or medical psychologist can recommend medical cannabis, and they can recommend it for any condition, as long as it’s a good fit for cannabis treatment.
• Get a recommendation: Once you talk through your concerns with a provider, they can issue a recommendation. They’ll send this recommendation straight to a cannabis pharmacy for you—no need to fuss with an application.
• Head to the pharmacy and start your journey: Once your recommendation is on its way, head to a cannabis pharmacy to browse products, choose a few starting formulas, and begin your path to all-natural healing.

In other states, the process is very similar. While you might have to search your state’s list of approved providers, meet the criteria for qualifying conditions, and submit an application to a state agency, it’s still easier than ever before to get access to medical marijuana.

TeleLeaf: Your Partner in Cannabis Care

Medical cannabis can offer all-around wellness support and help you live a healthier lifestyle. Just take it from us—the TeleLeaf team has witnessed the revolutionary results of medical marijuana firsthand.

That’s why we’re so passionate about connecting patients to all-natural, plant-based cannabis care. TeleLeaf is the best online medical marijuana card service provider on the market today, and we’re making it simple and painless to get a recommendation and forge a path to healing.

Ready to find the answers you’ve been looking for? Meet with one of our providers.

Sources:

University of Colorado Boulder. Study: Cannabis Can Make Workouts More Fun, But It’s No Performance-Enhancer.
https://www.colorado.edu/today/2024/01/03/study-cannabis-can-make-workouts-more-fun-its-no-performance-enhancer

Mindful. Beginners Body Scan Meditation.
https://www.mindful.org/beginners-body-scan-meditation/

American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine. The Connection Prescription: Using the Power of Social Interactions and the Deep Desire for Connectedness to Empower Health and Wellness.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

GoodRx. Why Does Weed Make You Hungry?
https://www.goodrx.com/health-topic/cannabis/why-does-weed-make-you-hungry

University of Virginia. What Is ‘Diet Culture’ and How Can You Avoid Its Pitfalls and Accept Your Body?
https://news.virginia.edu/content/what-diet-culture-and-how-can-you-avoid-its-pitfalls-and-accept-your-body

Medical News Today. What Are the Best Cannabis Strains for Chronic Pain?
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/

Healthline. What Is Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness and What Can You Do About It?
https://www.healthline.com/health/doms

Healthline. A Simple Guide to the Endocannabinoid System.
https://www.healthline.com/health/endocannabinoid-system