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spiritual , and financial health can be a result of living meaningfully and intentionally, and we discuss many of these concepts in detail on our website (while generally avoiding them in this book for the sake of attenuation). 
     
    The Main Ingredients
    In its simplest terms, there are two main ingredients of living a healthy life: eating and exercising . In other words: what we put into our bodies and what we do with our bodies. 
    This might sound overly simplistic—at the surface it is simple—but fundamentally, the two things that most impact your physical health are what you eat and how you exercise. You already know this, at least intellectually, but this chapter is designed to help you feel it emotionally and provide you with some incredibly simple tools to help you improve your health.
     
    Feeling Better
    The desire to improve your health has little to do with looking better . At least that’s not what we’re concerned with when we talk about getting healthy or living a healthy life (although, nearly 100% of the time, a person who starts living a healthier lifestyle starts looking better almost immediately, which is a fantastic bonus). Instead, we’re far more concerned about how you feel . We want you to feel better ; looking better is a nice perk that is essentially guaranteed once you start feeling better.
    Thus, we’re not concerned with your vanity muscles in these pages (even though a lot of this stuff will help them grow, if that’s what you’re interested in). Rather, we’re concerned with how you feel. We know if you feel better, you’ll be able to better enjoy every other facet of your life.
     
    What You Put Into Your Body
    Please note that we use the term diet throughout the next few sections to describe a dietary lifestyle (i.e., a change in what you consume on a daily basis). We do not, however, use the word diet to describe a temporary prescribed set of planned meals that will get you to a specific weight-loss goal (e.g., lose 30 lbs. in 30 days). A change in dietary lifestyle is not only a change in what you consume but a change in how you think about what you consume. A temporary diet almost always fails after the post- diet behavior commences. A lifestyle change, by definition, can’t fail unless you make a negative change thereafter.
    It’s also important to note that there is not a singular, ideal dietary model to follow to live a healthier life. This frustrates some people because it is much easier to be told what to eat; it’s much easier to follow a strict set of guidelines from which you are not allowed to deviate. 
    Our primary focus in the next few sections is on food (followed by several sections about exercise), but the above section title is deliberately broader than just food; what you put into your body encompasses more than your diet. That’s because it’s important to be cognizant of anything that goes into your body—anything you ingest like food or medicine, as well as anything that enters your body in any other way (e.g., through the skin). Remember, the desire here isn’t to lose weight or look better; the desire is to live a healthier life and feel better.
     
    Foods to Avoid
    With respect to the foods you eat, and irrespective of your dietary needs or requirements, there are certain foods you should completely eliminate from your diet if you want to feel better.
     
     
Processed and packaged foods . We want our food to be as close to its original state as possible. The additives and preservatives in packaged foods add no nutritional value to your diet, and the chemicals in some of these foods can be harmful to your long-term health.
Sugar . This includes all varieties of plain sugar (cane, raw, etc.), as well as anything you might refer to as sweets (cola, cake, candy, etc.).
     
    Drastically Reduce or Eliminate
    This part is usually the hardest part for people to follow. That’s because it’s easier to fast than it is to diet. Consequently, it’s easier