What are these tiny steps that we make every day? They’re habits. And humans truly are, as it’s often said, creatures of habit. Research suggests that almost half of all the activities we engage in over the course of a single day are done out of habit. Does anyone need to tell you to brush your teeth? Close your front door? Make a cup of coffee in the morning? Of course not. You carry out these little acts without thinking. But such routines can be incredibly powerful. Small, regular habits hold far more sway over our health than large and occasional activities. Allowing yourself three Feel Better in 5 health snacks a day, and doing them regularly and consistently, is going to do you far more good than pushing yourself through a grueling gym workout once every other week.
But getting new habits to stick can be tricky. We can’t simply decide to make a habit of exercising every day and expect to start doing it almost without thinking. Over the last few years I’ve studied and spoken with some of the world’s top experts in human behavior, and one of the things they’ve all told me is that if we want behaviors to become habits, they have to be easy. The fact is, it’s not enough to say that healthy living doesn’t have to be hard. What these experts have taught me is that it simply can’t be hard. If it is hard, you’ll fail. That’s why I’ve designed every health snack to be as effortless as possible—to give them the best chance of working for you.
As simple and easy as each health snack is, make no mistake: there’s complex science beneath each and every one of them. These health snacks have actual biological effects on the body in the same way that prescribed medications do. They change your system. They rewire you. If you could harness the power of these snacks and put them in a pill, that pill would be hailed as a miracle and be worth billions of dollars. This is real medicine based on the real and specific problems we have today. These health snacks will help you reduce levels of persistent inflammation in your body, which is behind the development of many of today’s health problems, such as type 2 diabetes, depression and heart disease. When you do some of my five-minute Body health snacks, for example, you can change the expression of your genes, wind back the aging process and increase levels of the brain hormone BDNF, which helps you make new nerve connections and may improve your mood.
But don’t worry—you don’t need to know anything about hormones, inflammation, or genetic expression. I’ve purposefully kept the science in this book as bitesized as the health snacks. If you’re interested in finding out more details about the science behind my recommendations, you can read up on it in my previous books or listen to my free weekly podcast Feel Better, Live More. And if you couldn’t care less? That’s absolutely fine. You don’t have to.
All you have to do to improve your health is give me fifteen minutes a day, five days a week.
