Healthy Lifestyle: Fitness, Nutrition, Body-Mind Practices for Personal Growth

A healthy lifestyle brings a variety of benefits. It can help you live longer and more richly, and it can serve as a foundation for many of your higher intellectual, emotional, spiritual, or creative pursuits.

Ancient world traditions have long known this. For example, Eastern yogis practice asanas (or poses) on the path to enlightenment; Greek citizens practiced athletics to build virtue.

Today, modern personal development thinkers discuss a healthy lifestyle as a prerequisite to peak performance.

In my work coaching executives, I frequently introduce an article called "The Corporate Athlete" that argues that physical fitness, nutrition, and adequate rest form the metabolic foundation for peak workplace performance.

Now, this is all well and good, but the more important question arises: 

Where do I start? With so much nutrition, fitness, and body-mind stuff out there, which should I choose?

This page, and the pages it links to, aim to help you answer that question.

The recommendations you find below represent the best of what I have found so far for creating a healthy lifestyle. When I say "best," I mean that these approaches seem to deliver the best results in my own life and for my clients.

Diet and Nutrition
Sorting through hundreds of diet plans can be a daunting task. And, I've tried a lot of them over the years.  Please see my diet and nutrition page, where I recommend an 80% Paleo Diet with Zone Diet principles.

Sleep
We all know that sleep makes up a crucial part of the foundation for a healthy lifestyle.  The effects of sleep debt are severe and can impair, not only your personal growth attempts, but also your normal functioning in the world.  Click here for sleep remedies for common insomnia.

Body-Mind
In addition to fitness, nutrition, and sleep, body-mind practices can dramatically increase your sense of well-being and mental clarity. (They'll also help you with fitness, nutrition, and sleep).

For information on types of meditation, please visit my pages on the effects of meditation, easy meditation instructions, and four of my favorite types types of meditation.

Many other approaches, such as yoga, tai-chi, and aikido and other martial arts can yield dramatic benefits. I am working to build pages on these as well and will provide links when they are ready.

Stress Relief
Many wonderful practices can help you prevent stress and also provide in-the-moment stress relief.  Please see my stress relief page for a full discussion.

In sum, we all know that cultivating a healthy lifestyle is important. But how do you sort through all of the millions of approaches out there to find the most effective approach?

I hope you'll check out the recommendations here and I hope you'll find them helpful.

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Related Articles

• Diet and Nutrition
• Meditation - The Effects of Meditation
• Meditation - Easy Meditation Instructions
• Meditation - Four Types of Meditation
• Sleep Remedies
• Sleep Debt
• Stress Relief
  
• Workout Routines