11 Health Principles To Transform Your Body (and Mind)

In Bigger Leaner Stronger, personal trainer Michael Matthews argues that you can get the physique you want without a trendy diet or a brutal workout. According to Matthews, all it takes is a simple and scientific approach to nutrition and exercise that uses two strategies: flexible dieting (a diet that allows you to lose fat, gain muscle, and eat the foods you love) and progressive tension overload (a workout approach that maximizes muscle growth). Matthews teaches you how to apply these techniques to your personal fitness goals and get strong and healthy fast.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to boost your motivation and willpower for your health and fitness journey, create a flexible dieting meal plan, and plan a workout program based on progressive overload. Throughout this guide, we’ll compare Matthews’s advice with that of other fitness and nutrition experts and share more practical tips for applying his techniques to your goals.

Author Tim Ferriss has spent years studying how to improve the human body—he interviewed and trained with experts, studied scientific literature, and tried out what he learned on himself. In The 4-Hour Body, he distills the most effective 2.5% of what he discovered into programs you can use to improve six aspects of your body: losing fat and gaining muscle, enhancing sex, improving sleep, managing injuries, improving sports performance, and living longer.

Modern society teaches us that we can accomplish anything through willpower and discipline—but what if that’s the wrong approach? In Willpower Doesn’t Work, psychologist and productivity coach Benjamin Hardy says we can’t just “will” our way to success. Instead, we need to carefully design our lives in ways that make reaching our goals inevitable, minimizing the need for willpower.

Our guide to Willpower Doesn’t Work will begin with a high-level overview of why willpower won’t allow you to reach your goals and Hardy’s proposed solution of designing your environment for success. From there, we’ll discuss how to optimize your working and resting environments, how to remove distractions that drain your willpower, and how to optimize your “mental environment” by adjusting your thoughts and habits.

Our commentary will explore the science behind Hardy’s principles. We’ll also compare and contrast Hardy’s ideas with some popular willpower-based self-help books, such as Grit and The 10X Rule. Finally, we’ll provide some actionable tips and tools to help you put Hardy’s advice into practice.

Do you find yourself mindlessly reaching for a quick snack of potato chips, or eating pizza more often than you’d like? There’s solid science behind these habits—our bodies have evolved to seek out high-calorie food, and the food industry makes these foods addictive. But by getting back in touch with our natural hunger and fullness cues, we can resist the pull of junk food. In this article, we’ll look at advice from four authors on how to do that.

In The Power of Habit, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charles Duhigg draws on extensive research to explore how habits develop into automatic behaviors that influence personal lives, businesses, and communities. He explains why unhealthy habits are notoriously difficult to break and provides a practical framework to help you understand and change any habit.

In this guide, we’ve restructured Duhigg’s key ideas to focus on how your habits form and what you can do to change them. We’ve also compared and contrasted each key concept with updated research on habit formation and expanded on Duhigg’s advice with actionable methods from other self-improvement authors and psychologists.

In Bigger Leaner Stronger, personal trainer Michael Matthews argues that you can get the physique you want without a trendy diet or a brutal workout. According to Matthews, all it takes is a simple and scientific approach to nutrition and exercise that uses two strategies: flexible dieting (a diet that allows you to lose fat, gain muscle, and eat the foods you love) and progressive tension overload (a workout approach that maximizes muscle growth). Matthews teaches you how to apply these techniques to your personal fitness goals and get strong and healthy fast.

In this guide, you’ll learn how to boost your motivation and willpower for your health and fitness journey, create a flexible dieting meal plan, and plan a workout program based on progressive overload. Throughout this guide, we’ll compare Matthews’s advice with that of other fitness and nutrition experts and share more practical tips for applying his techniques to your goals.

In Sleep Smarter, Shawn Stevenson asserts that high-quality sleep is the key to a healthier body, sharper mind, and overall increased quality of life. He provides a wide array of practical suggestions to help us achieve a good night’s sleep, incorporating nutrition, exercise, sleep habits, and aspects of our environment.

Stevenson is an educator, author, and professional nutritionist in the health and wellness field. He hosts the nutrition and fitness podcast “The Model Health Show” and also wrote Eat Smarter, a cookbook designed to help families eat healthier.

In this guide, we’ll explore the importance of sleep, the role of circadian rhythms, the impact of your sleep environment, and the unexpected benefits of sweet potatoes. In our commentary, we’ll explore more of the science behind why these strategies work, as well as some caveats when the research has produced mixed results.

Imagine a world where our lifespans aren’t limited by illness or aging, where people could live for as long as they wanted to. This sounds like something out of a science fiction novel, but according to Tony Robbins, Peter Diamandis, and Robert Hariri, such a scenario may be more fact than fiction. In Life Force, the authors explain how ongoing development of new technologies and information in the medical field may extend our lifespans beyond what we ever thought possible. Robbins is a bestselling author and speaker, Diamandis is a bestselling author and scientist, and Hariri is a neurosurgeon and scientist.

In our guide, we’ll explore the lifestyle changes you can make now to increase your lifespan and overall health. We’ll also look at new technologies that are rapidly improving our healthcare and upcoming technologies that have the potential to bring us even closer to the ideal of immortality. We’ll supplement this with elaboration on some of the authors’ more complex ideas, and we’ll contextualize the guide’s information in the fields of science, technology, and sociology.

In virtually every domain—be it corporate jobs, athletic pursuits, or even college admissions—top performers are pushing the boundaries of human possibilities. But this relentless quest for excellence often leaves us suffering from chronic exhaustion and burnout, harming our performance and even our health. In Peak Performance, human performance experts Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness attempt to remedy this situation. They argue that sustainable elite performance is possible by implementing cycles of stress and rest.

In this guide, we’ll break down Stulberg and Magness’s formula for maximizing performance into two sections. First, we’ll discuss their formula for growth and highlight optimal strategies for subjecting your body to stress and recuperating afterward. Next, we’ll examine their recommendations for converting this growth into maximal performance by developing a consistent routine, intentionally structuring your time, and harnessing your purpose. We’ll also supplement Stulberg and Magness’s recommendations with other works on self-improvement and discuss actionable steps to implement these recommendations.