If you’re like me and want to be healthy without giving up everything you love—and not feel guilty for “messing up”—then this book is for you. Before I tell you my story, I want you to know that I don’t expect it to be yours.
This book is designed to meet you where you are, whether you have thyroid problems similar to mine, or you’re prediabetic, suffering from an autoimmune disease, looking to lose weight, hoping to lift some brain fog, or simply in the market for tips to improve an already healthy lifestyle. The steps in this book are here to help you jump out of bed on Monday mornings regardless of where you start. In case we’ve never met before, let me back up a little.
Hi! I’m Elizabeth. It’s so nice to meet you. I’m a health coach, nutritionist, recipe blogger, and host of the cooking show Elizabeth Eats on FMTV. I grew up in the biggest town in Montana (80,000 people strong), where I lived in a quaint little postwar house with my mom, dad, and two older sisters. We didn’t have loads of money, but our home was full of love (and fighting teenage girls from 1994 to 1998). I was a cheerleader (don’t judge me) and took dance lessons every week for 18 years. Overall I was a pretty average healthy, happy-go-lucky kind of kid. Until I wasn’t.
It started in my early teen years with what seemed to be strep throat every month, followed by antibiotic round after antibiotic round. The doctor decided it was best to take my tonsils out when I was 15, and for years I never fully felt like I recovered from the surgery.
As luck would have it, I got mononucleosis the next year—and not even from kissing (because I was such a prude), which felt even lamer to teenage me. If I had to get sick, I wanted a cool story about it. I contracted mono most likely from sharing sugary drinks with my fellow cheer friends at football games. But how I contracted mono doesn’t really matter, what’s important is I was so sick I missed almost an entire semester of my junior year of high school. And although I started to recover slowly but surely, I did not regain full steam.
Age 15, right after having my tonsils out
The next year, climbing the school stairs a week before graduation, I suddenly had to sit down. I was winded—a strange phenomenon for a teen who was a dancer her entire life. A friend walked me to the nurse’s office, and I ended up at the doctor that day. A blood panel revealed thyroid levels so low, I needed to get on medication the very same night.
Over the next 10 or so years, I popped that thyroid medication every morning and didn’t think much of it. Except that once again I didn’t ever feel 100 percent better. Improved, sure. But something always felt off. Between bottomed-out energy levels and a few pounds I just couldn’t seem to shake, I lived my way into my 30s figuring I’d just have to accept that for some reason my thyroid quit working. Years later, after committing to figuring out my health, I discovered the idea of reactivation of the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV).
After a lot of confusing testing, hours upon hours of reading and researching other people’s stories, and absorbing all the information I could get my hands on, I asked my naturopath for an EBV test: It came back with sky-high antibodies of a recent infection. This was a huge surprise, because my diagnosis with mono was 15 years earlier.
Turns out that my low thyroid and constantly feeling tired all these years could possibly be attributed back to the first bout of mono and a chronic case of EBV. (If you want to read more about my EBV diagnosis, testing, and treatment, you can find all of that on my website, elizabethrider.com.)
I had to take my health into my own hands, and that’s what this book is here to teach you. It doesn’t matter whether you suspect your diagnosis may be the same as mine, struggle with a similar story, or just simply feel defeated despite knowing how to live healthfully but not following through.
The action steps for building a healthy lifestyle that you’ll find in this book will help you support your best health through positive changes that will serve you forever. Here, you’ll learn how to create healthy habits that work for you. And I don’t mean you’ll be living a sterile, indulgent-free life. I mean that you will both see results and look forward to continuing these new healthy habits.
Because while you can get results from just about any health program out there, if you don’t love your daily life, sticking with it may feel like torture. The road to vibrant health should feel expansive, not restrictive.
After years of feeling run down and struggling with my own healthy lifestyle, what I do know is this: When I started looking at my health from a full daily lifestyle perspective—where all areas, not just food, mattered—everything changed. I also know that while I can stick to any diet under the sun for a period of time, none of them felt sustainable for the long haul.
I turned to nutrition, first, and slowly but surely began experimenting. I became a certified health coach and immersed myself in dozens of different healing modalities from around the world. I studied more than 100 different dietary theories, committed myself in emotional healing techniques, completed my Pilates and yoga teacher trainings, and attended healing retreats all over the world to learn more about concepts like Ayurveda (India’s ancient system of medicine) and all-natural therapies that have dramatic positive effects on the body.
I completed the Cornell University Plant-Based Nutrition Program and integrated those teachings with my full-circle approach. I completed all three levels of Sanoviv Medical Institute’s Nutrition Advisor program to understand what cutting-edge approaches are available. (Spoiler alert: Food really is medicine.)
I learned what it meant to be healthy and well from all angles, and how undeniably important our emotional, spiritual, and environmental health are to preventing manifestation of disease in the body. I learned that eating real food helps, and most processed food delivers four seconds of pleasure for four hours of feeling like crap. That cutting out harmful chemicals from beauty and home products was easier than I thought, and how small lifestyle tweaks here and there made all the difference in my health.
In case you need a little kick in the tush to make an effort to live a healthier lifestyle, I want to remind you that you provide a tremendous amount of value to the world and people around you. Even if you don’t feel it at this moment, no one is born by accident.
You’re here to positively affect the people and world around you, be it your immediate family, a small group of kids you volunteer with, the team you lead at work, one patient in a therapy session, or the thousands whom you affect as an entrepreneur. Impacting the world and people around you becomes increasingly difficult if you don’t feel your best.
Your health is your greatest asset. It’s not your house, that 401k you’ve worked so hard to build, your savings, or your job. If you have your health, you can do anything. Without your health, your time, energy, and resources are consumed with not feeling well.
When you have your health, your time is opened up to do the great work you are here to do. Your people need you, and the world needs you. If that’s not enough, here are three more reasons why all of this matters:
Autoimmune disease diagnosis is on the rise at staggering rates, and we know that most autoimmune disease begins in the digestive tract (aka gut). And guess where all your food goes? In case you skipped your middle-school health class, the answer is your gut.
The good news is that the cells lining the inside of the gut turn over every three to seven days, so you can heal the lining of your gut and improve your health with food and lifestyle changes.
Chronic conditions such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and certain types of cancer are on the rise at alarming rates all around the world. These diseases are known as “lifestyle diseases” because they are largely preventable by means of diet and habit changes.
The number-one cause of death in the United States (and most developed countries) is heart disease. A recent study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that more than 50 percent of deaths from coronary artery disease (a type of heart disease) can be attributed to preventable factors such as eating unhealthy foods, poor physical activity, or heavy consumption of alcohol.1
Prevention of lifestyle-related disease starts with establishing healthy habits at home and in your kitchen.
You can slow the aging process. And I’m not talking about chasing a version of unattainable Hollywood youth.
Now that you know that the world needs you—there will never be another you—I want you to realize that you deserve to feel good on a daily basis. You have two ages: your chronological age and your biological age. Your chronological age is just a number on your driver’s license and passport. In my opinion, the more important of the two is your biological age—that is, the age of your cells.
The phenom that is your body is made of more than 50 trillion cells. To put that in perspective, one million seconds is about eleven and a half days. One billion seconds is about 31 years! And a trillion seconds? That’s 300 centuries ago, before there was even a written history. I share these numbers to remind you of how miraculous it is that you’re even alive.
Back to how we measure our age. On the outside, we may judge age by the look of our skin. But that’s just the beginning.
More important than those face lines you love and hate is the biological age of the inside of your body. Giving your cells the antiaging power of a healthy lifestyle will do far more than any single antiaging cream on the market, and—more important—it will give you a higher quality of life for a longer period of time.
Let’s get science-y for a moment: Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) can form in the body when sugars bind to some of our DNA, proteins, and lipids (fats). As my friend and biochemist Dr. Libby Weaver explains, this process can cause cells and tissues to not work properly, resulting in aging or, in some cases, disease.2
You have full control over how you feed your 50 trillion cells, and giving them what they need to thrive starts with daily Health Habits. Not a 10-day cleanse or short-term exercise plan. It’s your day in and day out healthy habits over time that count.
You deserve to feel good in your own skin. What that means is different for everyone. While it’s important not to chase photoshopped beauty that we all know isn’t real, it’s completely normal, and biologically ingrained, to want to feel good.
And while you know that looking like an airbrushed model shot from a perfect angle is unattainable, wanting to have the energy to play with your kids and feel confident in your clothes is your birthright.
One of the most common phrases I hear from my clients is, “I know life isn’t all about weight, but I just know I feel better at a certain weight. Is that vain?” The answer to that question is no. I’ll say it again: You are worthy of feeling good in your own skin. You deserve it and you’re worth it.
It’s been observed that people weigh more today than they did 20 or 30 years ago even though they are not necessarily consuming more food or exercising less.3 Think about that: a person is predicted to weigh more today than in the late 1980s even while eating the same amount of food (even adjusted for the ratios of protein, fats, and carbohydrates consumed) and exercising the same amount.
But why? While this observation has been confirmed by scientific study, the causes are mostly still hypothetical. Many, myself included, suggest that lab-created food, toxins in beauty products and the environment, excessive stress, low-quality sleep, and hormonal imbalances caused by said stress and toxins are all contributing factors.
Remember, you are meant to feel good. The notion that it’s normal to not feel well as you age—whether you’re in your 20s or 60s—is a myth. The phrase “We live too short and we die too long” has never been more true. There’s no proof that feeling unwell is a necessary part of life.
Not feeling well is an indication that something is off. Your body is a fine piece of machinery that will wear and tear with age, and small cracks and squeaks are common. But feeling unwell for long periods of time is not how you are meant to live, at any age.
Instead of a prescribed diet, this book is all about building daily habits that will turn into a healthy lifestyle you’ll actually look forward to living. There are loads of books out there about how we age, individual dietary theories, and the science behind the body. But few give guidance on how to implement healthy living on a day-to-day basis.
Most books focus on one specific diet or one step of the process. It’s not that these books aren’t useful—I own many of them—it’s that reading about theory doesn’t teach you how to set up your life so that healthy living is something you want to embrace.
This book focuses on action, not just theory. I’ll reference the science and theory when needed, but we’re going to focus on building a life that makes the action feel exciting. And for my fact-finder friends out there, you can take comfort in knowing that the information in this book is rooted in science and has been fact-checked from top to bottom.
You’re not in trouble or being punished. No shame allowed for past decisions. In fact, releasing guilt, shame, and fear is a big part of healing and achieving your highest level of well-being. You’re in the here and now, so consider today day one.
I ask that you read these pages with an open mind, and don’t assume I already know that. Try to stop your inner critic from telling you that something won’t work because you’re different, or that your goals for healthy living will never happen because you’ve tried before and it didn’t work. These steps work in harmony together. Trust me.
Don’t slip into overwhelm. You don’t have to do every single thing in this book at once, or even at all. Take what serves you and leave the rest. But take a lot. For real! This stuff works.
That said, read the whole book. While you don’t have to take action in the order that these chapters are laid out here, they all intersect at some point. So read all the chapters and then follow the 28-Day Kick-Start Plan in Chapter 9 to get the most benefit from these teachings.
Let go of perfectionism. You’ll learn this as we go, and it’s worth mentioning here, too: Consistency beats perfection every time because perfection doesn’t exist. No person is perfect. I’m going to teach you how to create a lifestyle that helps you keep up with your habits, not one that tells you to be perfect every minute of life. The purpose of this book is to help you create a consistency in your wellness habits and an environment that allows you to thrive.
Now, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. I’ll give you the bad news first because I like to end on a high note (and I don’t want you to stop reading this book). The bad news: If you’re looking for a black-and-white checklist of exactly what to do to become your healthiest self, you’re going to be disappointed. That kind of list doesn’t exist.
Trust me, if I could snap my fingers and give the surefire bullet points to lead you to health, I would. But that’s not how it works. Every experience you’ve ever had in life has brought you to where you are now, so only you have the power to untangle the habits that no longer serve you.
The good news: Once you decide to make positive changes in one area of your life, it’s easier to make positive changes in other areas, too. We’re going to do it together, one step at a time.
The even better news: I designed a 28-Day Kick-Start Plan and community to get you going, keep you motivated, and help you connect with like-minded women from around the world.
Let’s get started!