The Daniel Plan by Rick Warren, Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman

If you are looking to go from being physically unhealthy to physical health, you probably can find no better book than this to be your guide. It seems sound in its approach and written to gear one toward success. It approaches the subject with a five-pronged approach: faith, food, fitness, focus, and friends, encouraging you in its core chapters to consider each of those factors in becoming successful. Faith means relying on God’s power, not your own willpower, for the changes you seek. One of the longest chapters focuses on food. Simply put, The Daniel Plan, espouses choosing the bulk of your diet from things that grow, avoiding processed and overprocessed foods. This is, on its face, an easy diet to follow. The challenge is that it is so countercultural that it will involve, for most people, a major shift. Fitness is an important component to health, and this book offers a wide range of activity in order to make exercise a natural part of one’s life. Focus concerns your mental attitude, which is to be truth-based, rooted in the Word of God. Friends, this book says, are essential to success in the fight for physical health. Likeminded people will help keep you on track. Biblical principles are sprinkled throughout this book, which presents both the theoretical and practical. It is hard for me to think of a downside to reading and implementing the principles laid out in this book. More than ten years ago, I used this approach to lose weight and ward off impending diabetes. To my knowledge, it was not called The Daniel Plan yet, but it was plant based and avoided processed foods, and it worked and continues to work. I received this book for free in exchange for my unbiased review through the Thomas Nelson BookSneeze Program.