Table of Contents

Introduction

Eat the right foods

Rest properly

Eliminate stress and relax

Help your body with supplements

Drink plenty of clean water

Find your inner power

Introduction

If you want to lose weight and cleanse your body, there are a couple of simple ways to do it. The truth is that it doesn’t have to be complicated. It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money and it doesn’t have to take away a huge chunk of your time.

We make it more complicated than it is just to be able to give ourselves an excuse. An excuse to do nothing about it. But I know you are not that type of person, because you are reading this. You want to do something and to change your life for the better.

Because let’s be honest. Being fit and healthy isn’t just about the way you look. It’s about the way you feel, how much energy you have and how long you will live. The fact that it does make us look amazing is just a sweet bonus. We have only one life, and so many dreams that we can pursue and make real. We can only do it if we are at our best physically and emotionally.

Some of the tips in this book may surprise you, and some might sound too simple. Let’s not forget that common knowledge is not common practice, and what we do every day is what builds our life. We don’t need something spectacular once a month. In fact, what we do once a month doesn’t even matter. Our habits are the ones that sculpt us. What we do every single day is what builds our body and our life.

You will find here actionable advice, which you can apply right away into your life. You just have to make the decision to really commit to it. Stick to them until they become habits, and the results will never delay appearing.

I know this road is tough, and you don’t need any more fluff or fake promises just to make you buy something from me. You want the truth, the facts, the reality, and that’s what you will find here. Read and only apply once, and there will be no change in your life. Yet, if you really commit to it and apply even 1 of the tips you will find here in this book, the results will be long-lasting. The choice is yours.

So is the reward.

1. Eat the right foods

We don’t live in those times when we faced hunger anymore. The majority of the population has plenty of food at their disposal. In fact, we are living in an era where obesity is something very common and threatening for our lives.

What really happened?

We do have plenty of food at our disposal these days, but most of it is unhealthy and heavily processed. The reason is financial because it’s much more profitable to use chemical compounds and processed food than it is to use natural ingredients. And we aren’t talking only about fast food, because the majority of shelved products have added sugars, chemicals, and preservatives that have an impact on our bodies.

The human body is created to function with natural foods. Things that we get from nature. And this is the starting point of any detoxing plan.

Here is the deal. I can give you hundreds of methods that can help you detoxify your body and lose weight, but if we don’t fix the most important foundation for our bodies’ nutrition, we can’t have long-lasting positive results.

It’s like trying to build a skyscraper on dirt. No matter how great the other materials are, if you don’t have the foundation right, everything is going to fall apart. But if you have the proper foundation, you can be sure that you will build a very strong body.

What does it mean to be healthy, anyway? To be healthy means that we create the optimum environment for our body to function at its maximum potential. Our body is designed to flush toxins, keep the fat away and keep ourselves healthy. The problem is that our nutrition harms our body, thus decreasing the effectiveness of it.

Eating the right foods doesn’t have to be complicated or expensive. We have at our disposal these days a lot of opportunities that we can use to eat natural foods. Everything that is natural is healthy. Fruits and vegetables, meat and eggs, milk and diaries, all provide a good nutritional value to our bodies.

Don’t get yourself twisted by the new strange things that talk bad about everything, from meat to dairy products. If it comes from nature and it’s cooked properly, it’s healthy. Especially when we talk about foods that have high protein content and those that have a lot of fibers. The only way to ruin your healthy meal is by frying them, but otherwise, you can’t go wrong.

A balanced diet should include all macronutrients, carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. We need all of them to function properly and be healthy. The secret is to have them from healthy sources, not to eliminate one of them.

Low carb or low fat diets only work temporarily, having huge side effects on our health over the long period. Starving yourself is also the worst idea when it comes to losing weight, it only damages further your body, depleting your resources and exposing yourself to even more fat deposits.

Eat healthy foods, with a balanced diet and at regular intervals. That’s it! Nothing complicated about it. We try to make it complicated so we can avoid it. The simpler the better. And the best part is that you don’t have to give up your favorite things.

If you love chocolate, there is the healthier version of it, called dark chocolate (with 60% cacao content or more). If you love sweet drinks, you can always prepare for yourself green tea or ice teas with sweeteners. If you love sweet snacks, you can munch on fruits as much as you want. And if you throw twice a week a cheat meal where you eat anything you want, there’s absolutely no problem. What you eat most often matters, not what you eat once a week.

The bottom line is that what we eat is a very important nutritional foundation on which our bodies health is building. Without the proper and healthy foods, we cannot function to our best. To choose the proper shelved products is easy: read the ingredient list. If it is not something that you can cook yourself with basic ingredients, it’s not healthy.

Eliminate sugar and replace it with complex carbohydrates and sweeteners, replace fried foods and bake them or barbecue them, and you have yourself the most important step towards detoxifying your body and losing weight.

2. Rest properly

What does resting have to do with anything? Resting is a very important part of our wellbeing that most of the times get neglected in our “do as much possible” culture. We often forget that our bodies need recovery in order for them to function properly and stay healthy.

Sleep has a very important role in our brain: to clean the junk that was cumulated during the day and consolidate memory. Without proper rest, we face a ton of side effects.

“Sleep deprivation can noticeably affect people's performance, including their ability to think clearly, react quickly, and form memories. Sleep deprivation also affects mood, leading to irritability; problems with relationships, especially for children and teenagers; and depression. Sleep deprivation can also increase anxiety.

Sleep is important for overall health, and inadequate sleep is associated with numerous health problems. Research shows that not getting enough sleep, or getting poor-quality sleep, increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.

Sleep deprivation can also be very dangerous. Sleep-deprived people who were tested using a driving simulator or performing hand-eye coordination tasks did as badly as, or worse than, people who were intoxicated. Drowsy driving causes thousands of car crashes each year, some of them fatal.

Sleep deprivation magnifies the effect of alcohol on the body. A fatigued person who drinks will be more impaired than a well-rested person.”

Source: https://www.nichd.nih.gov/health/topics/sleep/conditioninfo/sleep-deprivation

I guess any person can say that they knew this and that is basic knowledge. Well, unfortunately, common sense is not common practice.

There is no better way in helping your body stay healthy and fit than getting proper rest and nutrition. And regardless of how busy your life is, it’s all into the habits. If you have a habit of neglecting your sleep and stay up very long doing something or scrolling down your social feeds, this will greatly impact the amount of good sleep you are getting.

But you can install a positive habit of having the proper rituals to set you up for sleeping. One hour before your scheduled sleep time you can drink some herbal tea, take a shower, read a good book or anything else that will relax you and prepare you for sleeping.

I want to emphasize the fact that any other method of cleansing your body and be healthy won’t work if you don’t get the proper resting. If you want to be productive, healthy and fit, you must make your shut-eye time a priority.

Technology has also created a negative impact on our sleep patterns. The problem is with the white screens of our smartphones, tablets, and laptops. That light that comes from our devices trick our brain into thinking it is still daytime and thus messing up with our secretion of melanin, the sleep hormone. The best cure for this is to put away any device two hours before sleeping.

Also, it is a good advice to install an app for it or use the feature called “eye comfort mode”, which dimes the high-intensity light into something much more sleep-friendly, that won’t mess up with your brain by making it think it’s daytime.

For Windows, there is a free software called F.lux that does that.

“Ever notice how people texting at night have that eerie blue glow?

Or wake up ready to write down the Next Great Idea, and get blinded by your computer screen?

During the day, computer screens look good—they're designed to look like the sun. But, at 9PM, 10PM, or 3AM, you probably shouldn't be looking at the sun.

f.lux fixes this: it makes the color of your computer's display adapt to the time of day, warm at night and like sunlight during the day.

It's even possible that you're staying up too late because of your computer. You could use f.lux because it makes you sleep better, or you could just use it just because it makes your computer look better.”

Source: https://justgetflux.com/

The idea is that there are a lot of methods to help you get proper resting, the only starting point is to have the intention to pay attention to your sleeping habits. While it is a basic thing to do, it is very important in keeping our bodies healthy, and only a healthy body can look good.

3. Eliminate stress and relax

Stress is a big contributor to disease and weight gain, being one of the most powerful health destroyers there is. And I don’t exaggerate with anything. When it’s chronic, it can literally kill you.

Stress is something natural that we have in our brains. It’s a reaction to outside dangers and situations. Moderate stress can increase performance and awareness, and it has been shown that it can have a positive impact on our lives if it’s properly managed. The problems come when it gets out of control.

We used to worry of tough things, like hunting to get our food and kill a Saber-toothed tiger so it doesn’t kill us. The response to stress, called the Flight or Fight response, is what kept us alive and made us a thriving species. We have to understand it’s purpose to understand how it works.

When our mind identifies a situation that is potentially dangerous, it secretes an abundance of hormones in our body that increase our alertness, reactions and gives us the energy to physically react to it. I said potentially dangerous because our mind doesn’t make a difference between something that is a real threat and something that we consider a threat.

Most of the stress that we have today is not life-threatening, but it has the same reaction in our bodies that a life-threatening situation would have. So, worrying about that test or about what people think of you, have the same effect on your body as something that is really dangerous.

Our brain is only interested in one thing: survival. Happiness and relaxation is our job, and it’s essential to learn how to do it properly.

There are three simple cures for chronic stress:

1. The importance test.
2. Physical exercises and breathing.
3. Positive information intake.

1. The importance test

The importance test is a very simple test you can do with anything that stresses you out. Ask yourself these questions:

-    How important would this thing I am stressing about be in 5 years from now?

-    It is life-threatening? What is the worst thing that could happen?

After you answered these questions, you have two options. You either let it go and never worry about it again, or you do something about it.

2. Physical exercises and breathing

Physical exercises are scientifically proven to help us relax and deal with stressful situations. When you engage in any kind of physical activity, you release dopamine and other happy hormones that help you counteract the harmful effects that stress has.

Breathing is also important because it has been shown that the way we breathe influence the chemistry in our brains. You can influence your emotional state by simply controlling the way you breathe. If you breathe shallowly and short, you will be stressed. If you take deep long breaths, your body and mind will relax.

When we are stressed, we don’t notice our breathing. But if you start to pay attention to it you will notice that when you are stressed out you don’t breath properly. If you pause and take long and deep breaths, your mind will instantly start to relax.

3. Positive information intake

Stress comes from the fact that we make something worse than it is. We take a simple public embarrassment for example, and we make it seem like the end of the world. The pessimistic circle starts to act on us, making everything look worse than it really is and making us feel awful.

The cure for the natural pessimistic side of our brain is to feed our minds with positive information. Motivational articles, inspiring videos, an amazing book, are just a few examples of things we can consume to feed our mind with hope and strength. What we put into our minds becomes the foundation for everything we create. If we put in our head garbage, we cannot create wonders.

While being realistic about the situations is necessary for properly being able to solve them, seeing them worse than they are will paralyze us with fear and make the situations worse. Feed your mind with positivity, and you will be able to tackle challenges from a winning strength point, not from a weak victim point.

These simple yet powerful tips will help you relax more and deal with stress from a positive perspective. I know that things outside of us are not entirely under our control, but how we react to them is entirely our choice. You are in control, regardless of how chaotic everything around you seems. Being relaxed helps you “attack” your problems like a winner and solve them as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Positivity is like the nitro booster that makes the race car have the extra edge and speed. Negativity is like the sand in the fuel tank, that makes the engine die.

It’s ok and even necessary to be realistic and see your problems exactly like they are, and not trying to make them prettier. Yet, the most productive thing is to tackle the problems from a relaxed and confident state, that makes you use your entire potential to fix whatever you have at hand.

Also, being confident and relaxed will help you live longer and better, as it also promotes good health and a general wellbeing. There are people that die young, going to sleep and never waking up due to their heart failing at night because of too much stress. And there are also people that leave past 100, feeling happy and joyful every step of the way. The best part is, you can choose whichever side you live.

4. Help your body with supplements

Your body's natural ability to fight diseases and stay healthy gets diminished by poor quality nutrition. It's not just the amount of calories that matters, but also what those calories are made of.

We get so caught up in the calories counting without realizing that there is a huge difference between 1000 calories from a fast-food and 1000 calories from fruits and veggies. The first part is calories from fats and sugar, with no nutritional value at all, and the second part is calories with fibers, complex carbs, vitamins and mineral that make our body stronger and healthier. The first part destroys your body and the second part builds it.

Today we don’t starve for food, we starve for nutrients. We are nutritionally starving, most of the population not consuming the nutrients their bodies need to keep them healthy.

Supplements are a great way to help your body replenish it's vitamins and minerals deposits. Even if is due to stress, high-intensity physical activity or a less than natural nutrition, our minerals and vitamins run low, affecting our natural body functions. Even digesting, breathing or cognitive functions can be affected by the lack of these important micronutrients.

Taking vitamins and minerals from an organic company is a great way to help your body be strong and healthy. It is also a risk-free way to become healthier. Vitamins and minerals come in daily recommended dosages, therefore you don't get any side effects if you respect the prospect and take how many it's written there. Also, our bodies have the ability to deposit the excess nutrients so it can use them when needed.

A great idea would also be to do a blood test to see the amount of nutrients in your body, to know exactly where you should focus if you need more specific supplementation.

Supplements are also not limited only to vitamins and minerals. There are a great number of plant extracts that help in various situations. For example, Siberian ginseng is a great supplement to help your overall body functions, from memory to sexual activity. Whenever I feel very tired and exhausted with life's projects, I take ginseng to help me stay focused and strong.

Green tea is also one great example, being the healthiest drink in the world. Green tea extracts are also used to create supplements for people that do not like the taste of the tea, but they want to take advantage of the amazing health benefits.

For those that are skeptical to use supplements, I totally understand you, because I used to be in the past too. Even so, what I've learned is that we don't have the natural nutrition necessary to get everything we want from food, and some people even have a problem with digestion. These problems interfere with our body's ability to absorb nutrients, thus making healthy eating less efficient. Sometimes, these digestive problems are given by a vitamin or mineral deficiency, so it's a vicious circle.

I personally felt the good effects that supplements have with helping our bodies stay healthy. It's one of the best help one can give to themselves. Prevention is always better than treating a disease, and alongside with healthy eating and resting, supplementation is one of the best health boosters. Promoting good health is what helps you detoxify and lose weight.

5. Drink plenty of clean water

We are up to 70 percent water, therefore it is no surprise that hydration is very important to our health. Without proper hydration, our bodies can't function normally. When we don't drink enough water, water with toxins in it is preserved in the body. That makes us more susceptible to sicknesses and weight gain.

Drinking liquids is not the same as drinking clean water. Soup, sodas or teas are not just water. They have plenty of other ingredients, like sugars or caffeine. It's like trying to wash yourself with Coke, it doesn't make you any cleaner.

We need to drink at least 2 liters of clean water daily to keep ourselves healthy and detoxified. While teas, shakes, and smoothies that are natural and healthy have a good effect in general, using them to replace your water intake will do more harm than good. We tend to forget that our bodies get clean on the inside with the same ingredient we use to clean anything else, clean water.

This is a simple habit to implement, but it has amazing results. It can also help you lose weight, as some studies have shown.

“Now a recent study in the Journal of Human Nutrition and Dietetics provides even more evidence that we should choose water over other drinks if we want to control our weight. For the study, researchers from the University of Illinois looked at data on the eating (and drinking) habits of 18,311 adults as recorded in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 2005 and 2012.

Survey participants were asked to recall their dietary intake over two separate days. They reported their consumption of plain water (which included tap water, water from fountains and water coolers, and bottled water) as well as their consumption of other beverages like soda, fruit drinks, energy drinks, sports drinks, and sweetened bottled waters. Participants were also questioned about their intake of “energy-dense, nutrient-poor” foods, like cookies, ice cream, chips, and pastries.

On average, participants drank 4.2 cups of plain water a day and took in 2,157 calories. About 125 of those calories came from sweetened beverages, and about 432 calories came from energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods.

The researchers found that the participants who drank the most plain water in their daily diet consumed fewer total calories, drank fewer sweetened beverages, and took in less total fat, saturated fat, sugar, salt, and cholesterol. In fact, they discovered that increasing plain water consumption by one to three cups a day could decrease calorie intake by 68 to 205 calories a day. That could add up to a lot fewer calories over time — and result in significant weight loss.

These results support prior research on this topic, which has shown that drinking water before meals and that substituting water for sweetened beverages can cut down on calorie intake and improve weight control. That means people interested in losing weight and improving their overall health could benefit from incorporating more plain water into their daily diet.”

Source: https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/big-benefits-plain-water-201605269675

Consequently, drinking plain water not only helps your body be healthy and strong, but it also helps you lose weight and detoxify. Going back to the basics is the best way to create the well-being we need and deserve.

6. Find your inner power

One of the least expected aspects of weight gain and sickness is our emotional wellbeing. We consider everything, from diet and the amount of physical exercises we have, but we neglect the things that started it all in the first place, our emotions.

When we are hurt and in emotional pain, we tend to suppress those emotions in a physical way. That can be drugs, alcohol, smoking, and even eating. When we eat a big amount of calories, our bodies relax as we get more blood into the intestinal area and less away from the brain. Here come the comfort foods. They make us feel good for a short period of time while adding tons of calories and toxic ingredients into our bodies.

Emotional control is very important in our lives because it influences everything we do. If we feel good, everything we do is good, and we have that “luck” that follows us around on every step. This luck is simply the fact that positive emotions make us feel good, thus allowing us to use our full potential naturally. When we feel bad or we are hurt, everything we do is bad. Our ability to excel is diminished and our emotional pain makes us lash out on things or mess things up.

Studies have shown that emotional intelligence is the most important factor in determining one’ success and happiness. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, control and express our own emotions. Without this important control, we become victims of everything that happens around us, becoming a reacting agent to random bad things that we also attract by our emotional state.

Taking charge of our own emotional state means taking charge of our life. Regardless of what happens around us, we choose how to react, and how we react influence how we feel. If we react like winners, we feel like winners, thus we have results like winners.

This emotional part usually gets neglected because it is not easy. It’s not easy to take control of our emotions and become the ones that are in charge of our lives. But what’s harder is to be a victim. Being in charge has amazing positive results, that will make our lives worthwhile. Do what is hard, and life is easy. Do what is easy, and life is hard.

Finding the emotional strength and balance is not something easy, I know. It requires constant effort and awareness, and you have to be always alert about your own reactions. But we have to understand that we are emotional creatures, and how we feel is the center of everything we do in life. If we are out of balance emotionally, everything else is out of balance. Our weight, our confidence, our relationships, and even our results are a chaos when we have chaos inside.

I wish these were things that are taught in school because it’s the most important aspect of our lives. You can have as much money as you want and tons of people that love you, and you can still feel so depressed inside that you take your own life. There are a lot of cases. Success without fulfillment is the ultimate failure.

Fulfillment is something you decide for yourself. Is an art. Whatever makes you happy, it doesn’t make someone else and vice-versa. For some people happiness is a busy life with a lot of things to do, for some, it is a quiet place in the woods with nature all around them. Happiness is not the same thing with success. You can be successful without being happy, and that is something horrible to live.

Choose whatever makes you happy. That includes the people you surround yourself with but also the work you pursue. We have only one life, and to waste it on something that doesn’t make us happy at all is depressing. No matter how crazy your dreams and visions seems, pursue them. It’s much better to fail at something you love than to succeed at something you hate. Fail is temporary anyway. As long as you never give up, you never truly fail.

This is my last and most important tip regarding your attempt to be healthy and lose weight. You must take care of your heart and what makes you happy. From there your inner power will emerge. You will surprise yourself with how much energy and vitality you will tackle obstacles towards success when you feel happy.

Happiness is the best ingredient and secret to life. We get tricked that we need to achieve things to be happy, when in fact we need to be happy in order to achieve. We need to create a powerful steady and unshackled happiness, that will be our support and foundation. It will be our energy and inspiration. It will be our strength!

For your happiness and success!