I’m often asked what is the best diet, or the best food program, best exercise program and which 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 best book, and there is no right way or wrong way to do it.

The 5 Critical things you must do to achieve your health are these

1. Continue to learn about health, fitness, nutrition and weight loss from a wide variety of sources

The single most important thing to do right from the start is to take action and begin learning about health, followed very closely by putting what you learn into practice. We are a very diversified bunch of people and what works for you may not work for the next person. You have to find what works for you from a wide variety of sources, expand your knowledge and accept no one thing as being the best for your health. Keep reading, keep learning and keep what works for you and discard what doesn’t.

Knowledge isn’t power, but “knowledge in action is power!”

Some very simple things to keep in mind is that the body runs on food and if you give it the best quality food, in whatever manor that happens to be, then you’ll probably get some good results in general. Keep the nutrition to a maximum by eating as close to nature as possible, organic where possible and eliminating processed foods and trans fats.

2. Find a mentor.

Someone who’s been there, done that and that you can model .

I realized at quite an early age that if we can model someone who’s been there and done that and gotten results, then you can “cut to the chase” as it were to find out what works for your health and weight loss – what doesn’t and in doing so get results faster.

Find a mentor, a role model for the things that you’re looking for. If it’s weight loss or to improve your health, find someone who’s walked in your footsteps and knows what you’re 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 the knowledge you learn about health on a daily basis

This is where the taking action part comes in. You must begin to apply the knowledge you’ve gained from what you’ve read about health or watched and by talking with people who’ve been there before you. If you do not put it into practice then you’ve become an information junkie and not someone who follows through on their knowledge. You must begin to work the principles you’ve learned on a daily basis and keep at it. Without the trial and error, you get nowhere fast and won’t truly know what works and what doesn’t.

4. Repeat steps one, two and three

Remember, there is no right way or wrong way to lose weight, improve your health or get what you want. You must continue to learn and challenge what you’ve read. I’m told that what I teach is wrong and I ask what were your results when you tried it? Well, they didn’t try it and 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 yourself, but without trying it and challenging it, you won’t ever know.

Keep learning about health, keep reading, keep applying what you’ve read and this new knowledge. Begin the process of filtering for yourself what will and won’t work for you. Remember this is about you, not me or the other guy, but what will help you achieve your weight loss goals or your health. This may very well be about applying certain fitness principles that sound so controversy that you figure they can’t possibly work. One of my favorite sayings is “believe nothing I say, but I challenge you to prove me wrong”. My intent is to have you try it.

When I first begun my journey to lose 300 pounds, I read one book and I preached the principles like they were the gospel. I was finally told to “shut up” and read something else, so I took it upon myself to learn whatever I could about health and weight loss. I began to apply my new knowledge daily, found people who had used the info before and what they believed about it, 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 large scope of your life, the next 30, 40, 50 or more years, what is a few days if you happen to get off track. Get right back on doing what you were doing, keep learning, keep trying new things, go back to what worked when it was working and keep up with your daily fitness routine. Probably the single most important fact about exercise or fitness is that our body is designed to move and we’ve gotten away from that. We must do something on a daily basis to exercise our body.

Never give up. Never lose sight of the health you want and keep working towards your goal.