Lifestyle Medicine Core Competencies: 2025 Update

Abstract

Lifestyle medicine (LM) competencies are necessary to outline the knowledge and skills required to become certified and practice evidence-based LM across various medical and health care professional disciplines. The earliest LM competencies were published for physicians in 2010 with an expansion of competencies in 2015 to include additional competencies relevant to physicians as well as a variety of other health care professionals, followed by a 2022 LM Competency update. As the global LM priorities evolved, the Lifestyle Medicine Global Alliance (LMGA) commissioned a review of the current competencies by the LMGA Scientific Advisory Committee. This resulted in two minor updates to the already existing planetary health and food processing competencies and the addition of a new competency to address social determinants of health (SDOH). This brought the total number of competencies from 88 in 2022 to 89 in 2025. As the field of LM continues to grow and organize globally, the need to create a structure for LM competency updates became evident. This article summarizes the competency updates and outlines the implementation schedule for future competency updates.