I’m often asked what the best diet is, nutrition program, exercise program, and what is the single best book to recommend to improve your health, fitness, or weight loss.
The answer is that there is no best way to do it. There is no such thing as a best book, and there is no right or wrong way to do it.
The 5 most important things you need to do to achieve your health are these
1. Keep learning about health, fitness, nutrition, and weight loss from a variety of sources
The most important thing to do right from the start is to take action and start learning about health, followed by putting what you learn into practice. We are a very diverse group of people and what works for you may not work for the next person. You must find what works for you from a variety of sources, expand your knowledge, and accept nothing but the best for your health. Keep reading, keep learning, and keep what works for you and discard what doesn’t.
Knowledge is not power, but “Knowledge in action is power!”
Some very simple things to keep in mind is that the body lives on food and if you give it the best food, in whatever way, you’re likely to get some good results in general. Keep nutrition to the maximum by eating as naturally as possible, organic whenever possible, and avoiding processed foods and trans fats.
2. Find a mentor.
Someone who was there, did it and you can model it.
I realized early on that if we can model someone who’s been there and done that and gotten results, you can kind of get to the point, so to speak, to find out what works for your health and weight loss — what doesn’t and doesn’t achieve results faster.
Find a mentor, a role model for the things you are looking for. When it comes to losing weight or improving your health, find someone who has followed in your footsteps and knows what you are going through. Model them. Do what they did, repeat their process and contact them to ask what worked and what didn’t. You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by doing what works and skipping what doesn’t.
3. Apply what you have learned about health on a daily basis
This is where the action part comes in. You need to start applying the knowledge you have gained from what you have read or seen about health and from talking to people who have been there before you. If you don’t implement it, you become an information junkie and not an advocate of your knowledge. You must start applying the principles you have learned on a daily basis and stick with them. Without trial and error, you’re going nowhere and don’t really know what works and what doesn’t.
4. Repeat steps one, two and three
Remember there is no right or wrong way to lose weight, improve your health, or get what you want. You must continue to study and question what you have read. I have been told that what I teach is wrong and I ask what were your results when you tried it? Well, they didn’t try, so I then ask, “What right do you have to tell me what I teach is wrong?”. It may have worked for me or for many people I coach, including you, but without trying and challenging you will never know.
Keep learning about health, keep reading, keep applying what you read and this new knowledge. Start filtering for yourself what works for you and what doesn’t. Remember this is about you, not me or that other guy, but what is helping you achieve your weight loss goals or your health. It may well involve applying certain fitness principles that sound so controversial you think they can’t possibly work. One of my favorite sayings is “Don’t believe anything I say, but I dare you to prove me wrong”. My intention is for you to try.
As I began my journey to lose 300 pounds, I read a book and preached the principles as if they were the gospel. Eventually, I was told to “shut up” and read something else, so I took it upon myself to learn as much as I could about health and weight loss. I started applying my new knowledge on a daily basis, finding people who had used the information before and what they believed about what worked for them for their health, and then discovered for myself what worked.
Finally I discovered the ultimate secret to health and weight loss.
5. Never give up.
It never ends. In the grand scheme of your life, the next 30, 40, 50 or more years, what are a few days when you happen to go off track. Immediately do what you were doing again, keep learning, keep trying new things, go back to what worked when it worked and keep up with your daily fitness routine. Probably the most important fact about exercise or fitness is that our bodies are designed to move and we’ve gotten away from it. We have to do something every day to exercise our body.
Never give up. Never lose sight of the health you desire and keep working toward your goal.
Thanks to Rob Cooper
