Basically what that means is to notice how you react after each thing you eat. If it sounds extreme, allow me to explain. When you were a baby and your mother wanted to wean you off milk, she didn't immediately give you a hearty helping of burger and fries. That would be too overwhelming. Not just because you didn't have too many teeth back then, but because there are way too many ingredients in a burger and fries and she had no way of knowing what you were okay with or allergic to. So she wisely started with simple meals. A carrot here. A boiled potato there. All while careful observing your reactions. If you continue that for the rest of your life, and carefully notice how your body responds to each new food, it wouldn't seem so overwhelming. But we lose that mindful awareness as we grow up, so now we have to start over.

The simplest (yet hardest) way to do this would be to cut out practically everything from your diet and slowly reintroduce them one at a time. That way you could isolate any reactions and you’ll know what’s causing what. As well as paying attention to indicators like weight loss and body composition, be mindful of important markers such as energy level, mood, appetite, normal bodily functions (ie: regular bowel movements and sleep), to see whether a particular diet is working for you. If you consistently feel terrible after eating a food containing lactose, you'll know to limit dairy products. If you don't have as much energy on a low-carb diet after giving it a go for a few weeks, logically it should follow that you rethink your decision.

Unfortunately, some of us are trained to accept discomfort as a normal part of life, especially when it comes to physical training and dieting, but there's a limit. You must learn to recognize when you are feeling uncomfortable in a way that's acceptable or a way that should not be continued. Track how you feel in a journal for at least a week to spot any abnormalities. Once you gather data from your experiences, make small tweaks instead of drastic changes. Introducing or eliminating too many things at once will simply muddle what's working and what's not.

Pros of this method: You will get a very accurate understanding of how your body reacts to every single food, so you will be able to develop a detailed diet that works well for you personally.

Cons of this method: The downside to this method is that it can take months or even years to learn how you react to every possible food or combination of foods, depending on how much time you leave between introducing a new food. Also, I would only recommend this to people who are robust, fit, young (but over 18, obviously) and objectively healthy to begin with. I would recommend, furthermore, that if you try this out, you do so under the strict supervision of an expert, like your doctor or a qualified nutritionist, as it can be very dangerous, if done improperly.

I urge you to thoroughly look into things for yourself, as it's the only way to make sure you aren't being fed incorrect or doctored information. Don’t trust what bloggers, journalists, newspapers or even well-meaning friends and family tell you about studies they have read. For one thing, they could have misunderstood them. Another possibility is they could be misrepresenting the facts (either intentionally or by accident) or they could just be downright lying about the study existing at all. You never really know unless you do your own research and read the actual studies in their entirety. Be particularly careful about checking who funded each study. If they had a vested interest in proving or disproving the subject, perhaps that is a fundamentally unreliable study to begin with.

Pros: If you read a study for yourself, you will know exactly what the researchers tried and concluded. You'll know if the results can be trusted and in which circumstances the information can be useful to you.

Cons: It takes a LOT of time and know-how to read and understand even rudimentary studies. In many instances, you will need to do further research just to fully understand what you’re reading. Granted, this will leave you very knowledgeable, if you do it properly. But it’s unlikely you’ll have enough time to read every new study (or old one, for that matter) as they come out so often, and are very long and complicated. Unless it’s your job to read them, I doubt you’d want to spend all your free time in this way, so you may need to pick which battles you're willing to fight. And by that I mean become selective of which studies are worth your time.

At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how scientifically sound a diet is, if you don’t stick to it, it won’t benefit you. I realized this when I was trying to figure out which method of cooking broccoli maintained the nutrients better. I soon found out that the method which retained the nutrients was the one I considered the least palatable, as well as the one that took the most time and effort. So I ended up avoiding broccoli altogether. When I did eat it, I would smother it in sauces that weren’t the healthiest, which defeated the purpose of eating it in the first place. I eventually realized that it’s way better to get half the nutrients, if it means you’ll eat twice as much. After all, you'll get absolutely no nutrients, if you don’t eat any broccoli at all.

Pros: It’s easier to follow a healthy diet when you aren't a Nazi about it. I’m not saying to go on a rampage and only eat what you enjoy. Sometimes we have to avoid the tastier things to stay healthy. All I’m saying is there are thousands of ways to cook each ingredient, so experiment until you find the way you like the most. Just make sure you only choose from the healthier options, not the lesser of two evils. Choosing your favorite between a snickers and a mars bar isn’t going to yield significant results.

Cons: Come to terms with the fact that sometimes the way you enjoy preparing a food the most may not be the healthiest way of all the possible ways to prepare it. But at the end of the day, if the only way to eat your vegetables is for you to throw a fatty sauce all over them, so be it. Just be careful you’re not completely cancelling out the merits of eating your veggies. If you deep-fry them, coat them in egg batter and smother them in salty cheese sauce, it will probably still count as an unhealthy meal. I certainly wouldn’t recommend you do it every day.

Now because I’m strictly talking about diet and not being healthy in general, I’m not going to tell you the obvious (that you need to exercise at least a little bit every so often to stay fit and healthy). What I will say, however, is that various international studies have proven that the "calories in VS calories out" model is deceptive. There is a kernel of truth to it, but there's more to the story. You’d have to run for an hour to burn a measly 500 calories and guess what? There’s way more than 500 calories in most foods these days. For example, there are 1010 calories in 100g of big mac. An entire big mac weighs 219g, so there are 2180 calories in the whole thing. There are 60 calories in 100g of mango and 336 grams in a whole mango, which means a whole mango has just 201 calories. You get way more food for way less calories.

So let’s say you had a bacon and egg McMuffin for breakfast with coffee, a big mac with medium fries and a cola for lunch and a quarter pounder with medium fries and a cola for dinner. I hope to God you don’t eat like this, and you’ll see why in just a minute. All of those meals, when combined, add up to a whopping (1240+658+2180+340+612+2270+340+612) 8251 calories! That means you’d have to run for 16.5 hours EVERY SINGLE DAY, just to break even! There’s no way you'd have time for that, unless you’re a professional runner and that’s literally all you do all day.

So please don't kid yourself. You can't excuse eating horrible things by going for a workout afterward. It simply doesn't work and besides, even if it did, you would still get all the nasty effects like high blood sugar, high cholesterol, high sodium, etc.

Sticking to the mango VS big mac idea from above, let me explain how it's not how much you eat, but what you eat that matters. Eating 100 calories of mango is not going to have the same results on your body as eating 100 calories of big mac. 100 calories of mango is a medium sized mango, and weighs about 180g. It has carbs, protein and barely any fat at all. It offers vitamin A, K and C, beta-carotene, fibre, magnesium, iron, antioxidants and absolutely no cholesterol. In fact, it actually lowers cholesterol, prevents asthma, aids digestion, increases bone, nail, skin and hair health, promotes calcium absorption, boosts the immune system, prevents heart disease and cancer.

On the flip-side, 100 calories of big mac is only one fifth of a burger, so you don’t even get to eat the whole thing! One quarter of it will be fat (and not the good kind, mind you), one fifth of it will be cholesterol, another fifth will be sodium and one tenth will be protein. Mind you, there is still protein in a mango. But the mango is 1% protein whereas the burger is 10% protein. There is calcium, iron and a tiny amount of vitamin A in the burger, which is great. But all the saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium and sugar in it hinders the body from properly making the most of the good things in it, because it'll be too busy fighting off the negative effects of all the bad things.

This doesn't seem to be worth the flavor, considering 1/5 of a burger wouldn’t even fill you up as much as a whole mango. Even if you somehow managed to stay under your daily caloric allowance and maintained an average BMI while on a Mcdonald’s diet (you wouldn’t be eating much, I guarantee you that much), you would still have to worry about your health deteriorating, due to the unhealthy things IN it and the many necessary components to a healthy diet NOT in it. This is why portion control may make you look slim (before it inevitably ruins your metabolism and you revert right back to a larger size), but it can’t make you healthy, if you’re not eating healthy foods.

Chris Voigt once proved that it's possible to live off potatoes alone. He did it for a month, I think, before he got so bored he had to stop. No one is arguing that certain foods have so many nutrients they can sustain human life for ages. But there are drawbacks. First and foremost, it’s boring! People like variety in their meals. We enjoy complementing one flavour with another, which is why we create recipes with multiple ingredients and don’t just mono-meal on one type of fruit or vegetable every time (I know some people do, but that’s beside the point).

There’s a reason why we like variety and why we get bored when we eat the same thing over and over again. We evolved to crave variety, because that's how we can get the most nutrients in one meal. It would take a lot of potatoes to reach your daily nutritional requirements for every nutrient you need to maintain optimum health. But combine that with 5 other vegetables, spices and grains, and you’ve got a balanced meal that not only delights your senses, but nourishes your body as well.

When you eat the same foods over and over again, even if it’s a different meal for every day of the week, but the same meal plan each week for months, you limit yourself to whatever nutrients are in those foods, leaving out hundreds of others. Nowadays even the poorest among us can afford to vary our diets – especially if we live in the developed world. We import foods from all over the world too, so we’re not limited to local or seasonal foods either.

Nowadays the 8 glasses of water a day myth has been debunked. In fact, some people have actually died, because they tried to have all their daily 8 in one fell swoop (seemingly to get it over with, because it’s quite unpleasant to drink water when you’re not thirsty) and they ended up diluting their system way too much too quickly. We humans have developed a sophisticated thirst mechanism over thousands of years to alert us to when we need to drink more water - and it works very well, if you let it.

The first thing that needs to be done in order for this to work, however, is that you stop drinking sodas, juices, teas and coffees. Not only are they filled with sugar (and sometimes way worse things), but they suppress both your appetite and your thirst, so you don’t realize when you’re hungry or dehydrated.

The second thing is to only drink water when you’re actually thirsty. Don’t force yourself to drink when you don’t feel like it. The only exception I would recommend would be to drink a glass of water right after you wake up in the morning and one half an hour before every meal. The first wakes up your body’s systems and gives you a great start to the day, and the second makes sure you are actually hungry before you eat. Sometimes the thirst trigger feels like a hunger trigger. Especially if you don’t drink much water very often and you’ve grown unaccustomed to what it feels like.

Cravings are your body’s way of telling you it needs something it needs to function at optimal levels. When you deprive yourself of sustenance and restrict the calories you consume, your body will retaliate and try to tell you that you need more. It will make you crave really calorically dense foods (the notoriously unhealthy kind) to make up the deficit as fast as possible. This is because your body is panicking. It doesn’t know there's a supermarket just down the road and you can afford to buy food whenever you like. It thinks you’re still living in a cave somewhere and food is so scarce you may just drop dead, if you don’t find something to eat real soon. When you make sure you eat until you’re full, you’re making sure your body doesn’t panic and overreact like that. Of course, you need to keep in mind what you’re eating, because if the food you’re putting into your mouth is causing inflammation and constricting your arteries, your body will continue to revolt.

However, sometimes while you're eating healthy things, maybe you don’t eat them in the right quantities or varieties, so cravings might be giving you different information. When you crave chocolate, it could mean you’re deficient in magnesium. When you crave salty potato chips, it might mean you’re deficient in B vitamins, vitamin C or that you’re going through a lot of stress and your stress hormones are fluctuating in ways your body doesn’t understand. There are a lot of reasons why we crave the things we do, so it would be very beneficial for you not only to look up what each craving means scientifically (Google is your friend), but also to go get a blood test done, so you have a more accurate idea of what nutrients you need to be looking out for specifically according to your body.

Life happens and it throws you off course sometimes. Having a child, getting married, losing your job, moving to another country, losing a loved one. All these things mean you may not be able to continue the same diet for one reason or another and so it would be wise to re-evaluate your current nutritional strategy. Ask yourself if it will continue to work under these new circumstances.

When experts talk about food, they refer to it as though it exists in a vacuum. They don’t talk about it with regard to what’s going on in the rest of your life. And that’s mainly because they don’t know what’s going on with you. Only you know that and so only you can adjust to it. People don't fit into neat little nutrition boxes. You need to recognize that every body (and here I really do mean BODY) functions in a completely different way – yours is no exception.

General nutrition plans are just guidelines and, although they can help establish a structure, it's up to you to find out the ways in which they can benefit you best. Your ideal diet depends on your body and your body changes as you go through life, so your idea of what is best for you also needs to change. Every choice you make will affect which diet you will need in the future, so make every decision with that in mind.

And now for my humble opinion…

Of course, I would be remiss, if I didn’t mention that I personally believe a plant-based diet comprised entirely of whole foods that are local and seasonal, mixed with a healthy portion of grains, seeds, beans and legumes is going to be way healthier than anything containing processed, packaged, imported food containing eggs, meat or dairy. However, I will not go so far as to say that there are no exceptions. There are always exceptions and I invite you to look for them with a healthy questioning attitude.

Don’t accept things you are told (even if it was your sweet old grandmother or a respected scientist who told them to you) without first doing your own research. Science has been known to publish something that is considered correct at the time, but then gets debunked as technology and science progress through time. It’s important to stay on top of things as important as health and nutrition by constantly updating your knowledge as new information becomes available.

Use your reasoning ability, be open to learning new things that might challenge your perceptions. Sometimes the things you learn might force you to acknowledge that you have been incorrect in thinking something was good for you when it wasn’t. That’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it is vital – if you value your health – that you accept this truth and don’t deny it despite the information proving it to be true.

If you try out the tips I’ve mentioned and still find it difficult to put to practise, ask me for help using the comments below, send me a message, or book a FREE breakthrough session to see how I can help you using Skype.

You can find more Happiness Strategy videos on my YouTube channel, so subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode! A new one comes out every Sunday.

Until next time, remember: Happiness doesn’t require energy. It requires Strategy.