It seems like everyone is pretty wild about plant-based diets these days. I’m a bit more reserved in my enthusiasm.

Why? Because when I hear “plant-based diet,” I can’t help but picture what a lot of plant-based dieters primarily consume — namely, industrially processed bread, pasta, breakfast cereal, crackers, refined vegetable oils, fake “veggie” meats, fake “veggie” cheeses, “veggie” chips, refined sugars, and all manner of not-terribly-good-for-you, ostensibly plant-derived ingredients.

You know the stuff I’m talking about: All those “technically-made-from-some-part-of-a-plant-but-I-can’t-really-say-which-or-how” ingredients, like hydrolyzed soy protein, modified starch, enriched flour, fractionated palm oil, and high-fructose corn syrup.

Occasionally eating and enjoying those things isn’t necessarily going to kill you, but it’s not the kind of “plant-based” eating that’s most likely to transform and sustain your health for the better, either.

So what is a good basis for a plant-based diet? Glad you asked, because the answer is simple: plants.

Plants with leaves, stems, and vines, and also the lovely orbs, pods, nubs, blooms, and seeds that grow from them. Eaten just like that. Or, OK, maybe rinsed off and sliced up and cooked a bit if you like.

I’m talking about plants that still reflect some semblance of their original color, shape, or texture. Plants that are recognizable as plants or plant bits. Plants that haven’t had all the beautiful life and rich nutritional properties processed right out of them.

As I shared in my last column (“Revolutionary Act 23: Eat Fresh”), there’s huge value in food that has its structural integrity and biochemical oomph still intact, and there are real liabilities in consuming an excess of foods from which that integrity and oomph have been largely extracted. Unfortunately, the most convenient, popular, and highly promoted “plant-based” options in our food -supply fall into the second category.

Many of these food products are rendered palatable and attractive by virtue of their considerable processing and packaging, and they are craftily designed to make us want to eat more of them. Always more. Until we’ve eaten so much we feel sick, tired, logy, bloated, dull, clogged up, remorseful, or simply mystified about why we just ate everything we did — and why still, a few moments later, we might be inclined to eat just a little bit more.

Happily, there’s a cure for this syndrome. But it involves some mental recategorization and physical adjustment. It also involves a reprior-itization of the foods you eat on a daily basis, and some savvy about how to circumvent the ubiquity of so-called plant-based foods that may do your body more harm than good.

Here are the three best strategies I know for managing that:

Start seeing (and seeking) phytonutrients. “Phyto” means plant, and it originates from the Greek word phyton, which translates literally as “that which has grown.” A nutrient is basically any substance that helps an organism survive, grow, and flourish. But what you really need to know about phytonutrients (which many people don’t) is that they aren’t just raw macronutrient fuel or basic vitamin-and-mineral matter.

On the contrary, they carry powerful and complex biochemical information. They transmit important signals and ingenious operating instructions that your body responds to and begins acting on almost immediately.

Phytonutrients are a big part of what gives brightly hued produce its beautiful colors (purple in blueberries, green in kale, and so on), and each of those different colors tends to signal different health-promoting properties.

Almost all brightly colored vegetables (and a few white ones, like cauliflower) tend to reduce inflammatory, oxidative, and premature-aging responses. They discourage cancer-triggering and cancer-growing responses. They encourage healing, detoxification, and repair responses. And thus, they tend to make you look and feel a whole lot better.

For all their artistry and intelligence, phytonutrients are also delicate little things, and they perish easily. They abound in most fresh plant foods (and also in herbs, spices, seeds, legumes, and whole-kernel grains), but confronted with the ugliness of most modern food-processing methods (think heat, pressure, pulverization, chemical intervention, and extended shelf storage), they quickly keel over and die.

The other thing to know about phytonutrients is that they can impart an incredible array of complex, nuanced flavors and aromas — from intense bitterness, twang, spice, and sulfur to delicate floral and herbal notes.

So if you are interested in flavor complexities, and you know how to bring out the best in veggies (meaning you don’t always resort to super-blah steaming), you’re probably going to enjoy them much more.

If your palate is more accustomed to breakfast cereal and hamburger buns, or you have no culinary skill whatsoever, you may need a gradual ramp-up strategy to move from iceberg lettuce to spinach to arugula to dandelion greens. Start experimenting. Allow your palate to evolve.

Reverse your ratios. Most of us have been socially programmed to see as “normal” a plate dominated by starchy carbs and animal proteins, and lightly dotted with a little actual-plant produce. In most conventional restaurants, vegetables are still presented as “sides” and “accompaniments,” or mere garnishes.

The problem is, our bodies prefer to have the ratios reversed — a whole lotta nonstarchy plant food with a satisfying side of other stuff. But translating that happy-body ratio to our everyday plates can be challenging.

My preferred approach: Start by assembling a full or near-full base layer of colorful, nonstarchy vegetables, then place moderate-size servings of animal or plant proteins (and whatever starchy bits and condiments you’re excited about) on top of that.

Use your fork and knife to assemble bites that contain delightful little combinations of those items, and pay attention to how much more quickly your hunger gets satisfied when you are eating this way.

More restaurants are now offering these sorts of veggie-centric “bowls” and salad-based entrées as options to their standard fare, and you can always ask to have one prepared from available ingredients listed in other dishes.

Spark your plant appetite. A lot of people say they don’t crave vegetables as much as they wish they did. The trouble is, the fewer of them we eat, the fewer of them we tend to crave.

Flirting with aromas often helps stimulate my fresh-food appetite (cut open a cucumber, or bruise a basil leaf and take a whiff). So does starting the day with a veggie smoothie, or perusing veggie-centric cookbooks and learning to prepare even dull basics in appetizing ways (I find sautéed-to-golden zucchini slices vastly more appealing than pale, raw spears).

Ethnic restaurants are great places to explore a wider and yummier variety of vegetables, in part because most non-U.S. cultures have a long history of making them a more central and creative part of their menus.

But for me, the best healthy-appetite sparker of all has been embracing my responsibility to my healthy body, and realizing that I can learn to love (or at least actively appreciate) anything and everything it needs to thrive.

The first time my mom told me that the food I was eating had “no life force,” I had no idea what she was talking about. I replied with an eye-roll and a sigh, as adolescents are wont to do, took another bite of my boxed macaroni and cheese, and mumbled: “Geez, Mom, of course it has no life force. It’s just food.”

It took about 15 years (and a lot of dietary experimenting) to change my mind about that. Today, I’m not too proud to say I was wrong. I’m also not too proud to admit that, despite spending more than a decade as a health journalist, I know only a little more about nutrition than I did back then.

I still can’t claim to understand exactly what a food’s “life force” is, or precisely how to measure it in all its forms. That’s OK. I can’t explain how the Hadron Collider or Dark Energy work, either. What’s clear to me, though, is that a bunch of “forces” we don’t understand exist in nature (and by extension in our food and in us) and they probably matter quite a lot.

Just as with particle physics, however, most of us have relatively little idea how food works in the human body. And a lot of what we think we know is probably wrong.

For a long time we’ve been encouraged to think that if something isn’t listed on a Nutrition Facts label, it probably doesn’t matter that much. But some of the very best, most health-promoting foods (like fresh produce) have no nutrition label at all. And these days, trying to judge a food by its nutrition label is a little like trying to find true love on Tinder: What you see is not always what you get, and what you get may not be at all what you want or need.

Sure, we all know at least a little something about vitamins, minerals, fats, proteins, carbs, and calories — because they represent the bulk of what the mass media and dietary powers-that-be have told us matters. But far fewer of us realize that foods contain (or at least ought to contain) an astonishing variety of other “nonessential” but health-critical components — like phytonutrients, enzymes, fatty acids, and probiotics — that haven’t gotten nearly as much popular press.

And while we might be able to live without these nutrients for a little while, we aren’t likely to look or feel nearly as good, or live nearly as long, as if we made them a central and consistent part of our diet.

Make no mistake: Trying to have a serious conversation about the “life force,” “prana,” or “vibrational frequency” of food is still likely to generate eye-rolling in all but the New-Age-y-ist of circles. But I don’t think that should prevent us from evaluating how the subtler and less-well-understood forces within food might affect us. And apparently, a good chunk of the scientific community is inclined to agree with me.

Today, some of the hottest areas of nutrition research are focused squarely on phytonutrients, fatty acids, enzymes, and probiotics. You know what all those things have in common (other than being well represented in “superfoods”)? They all contain bioactive compounds that interact powerfully with your body’s chemistry, influencing your digestive system, central nervous system, immune system, microbiome, even the expression of your DNA.

You know what else all those things have in common? They are fragile; reactive to heat, light, and air; and they don’t respond well to most industrial food processing. Which is why they are largely absent from the heavily processed foods that form the substrate of the standard American diet.

That means that if you want to get more life-giving foods in your system, you can’t eat like most people eat. On the contrary, you need to seek out the most lively foods available in our food supply.

If you’re interested in doing that, here are my top seven tips:

1) Learn to enjoy food in its natural, original state. That means eating it as soon as possible after it was picked, harvested, hunted, or gathered, and before it gets pulverized, denatured, hydrolyzed, bleached, pressurized, hydrogenated, or chemically or mechanically separated into component parts. That means that if the food is from a plant, it’s recognizable as a part of a plant (not a ridged “veggie chip” whose first ingredient is potato starch). If it’s from an animal, it’s recognizable as part of an animal (not a breaded “nugget” or “tender” that has been blended with a dozen other ingredients, mechanically prechewed, extruded into a novel shape, then prefried and frozen for quick microwaving).

2) Choose wild, local, organic, handled-with-care food when you can. The health potential of a food starts with the soil in which it is grown (or the quality of the environment in which it is raised), and it can be dramatically affected by every step of handling and storage it undergoes on its way to your plate.

3) Seek out “living” foods. While fresh is generally best, many naturally aged, fermented, and sprouted foods come with some extra “life” (in the form of living organisms and enzymes) built in. Consider sprouting your own nuts and seeds, and choose fermented foods from the refrigerator case (vs. shelf) to ensure maximum bioactivity.

4) Avoid overcooking your food. While the bioavailability of some nutrients (like the lycopene in tomatoes) appears to be enhanced by cooking, a great many other nutritional factors get degraded or destroyed by heat. High heat also has a tendency to negatively affect the chemical stability of fats. This doesn’t mean you need to eat all your food raw. It just means that enjoying at least some of your food fresh or very lightly cooked is a good idea.

5) Add some fresh, live foods to every meal. Let’s say you’re eating some pizza, canned soup, a ham and cheese sandwich, or macaroni and cheese (no judgment). Sprinkle some fresh herbs on top. Plop a handful of greens, a side of slaw or kimchi or a little cloud of fresh sprouts on the side. Add a few carrot sticks, a few cucumber or zucchini slices, a scattering of arugula, whatever. At the very least, spritz a wedge of lemon over your meal. The goal here is not just to begin incorporating more live-food nutrition into your diet, but also to start acclimating your taste buds to fresh flavors, aromas, and textures, priming your body to start craving them instead of the steady stream of dead-end junk you’ve been feeding it.

6) Handle your food with care.  Keep fresh foods stored properly — at their preferred temperatures and humidity levels. When food starts looking faded, wilted, or “blah,” that’s a pretty good indication that it has lost a lot of its nutritional oomph.

7) Expand your food skills. One of the reasons we depend so heavily on dead and deadening food is that many of us have lost the basic skills required to confront foods in their fresh, live state and to quickly turn them into something yummy. Not up for learning to “cook”? Start by learning to throw some fresh veggies and fruits in the blender for a quick green drink. Learn to toss a handful of dark salad greens on a plate and drizzle olive oil on top. Learn to sauté a piece of fish in a hot pan. Learn to cut an avocado in half, add a sprinkle of salt and a squeeze of lime, and eat it with a spoon. From there you can expand your fresh-food skills. Every time you do, your body — and your life force — will thank you.

Back when I was a kid, elementary schools did a thing I don’t think they do much anymore.  About once a year, they had a dental hygienist come in and show us how to properly brush and floss our teeth.

It was pretty fun. The hygienist (back then, it was always a she) had this big set of plastic fake teeth she’d use to demonstrate proper technique. After the demo, we’d each be given a little kit with a new toothbrush, a mini tube of paste, and a tiny package of dental floss (courtesy, I assume, of some corporate sponsor intent on building its next generation of loyal consumers), and we were instructed to do our best.

Next, we’d be given a little red tablet to dissolve in our mouths and swish around. The dark-red dye from the tablet (I shudder now thinking about what kinds of chemicals it contained) would stick to the remaining plaque residue in our mouths, showing where our cleaning efforts had been subpar.

Predictably, most of us had bucked the hygienist and largely ignored our difficult-to-reach surfaces. It provided a great, highly memorable gross-out experience for the whole class.

These days we have an astonishing array of high-end, sonic-electric toothbrushes; high-definition, nanoscience whitening toothpastes; stretchy microfiber flosses; tartar-control mouthwashes; and stain-removing strips, gels, and apparatuses of all kinds.

And yet, I’ll bet that if you gave most of us adults a little red tablet to swish around after our standard daily dental-hygiene regimen, you’d find that even our grown-up efforts are leaving a fair bit to be desired.

There’s a reason for this: No matter how much mass-media emphasis we place on the value of sparkling white teeth, minty-fresh breath, and high-end dental accessories, most of us still don’t really grasp the deeper importance of properly caring for our mouths.

Sure, we run a brush around in there a couple of times a day. We floss when we think of it. But we tend to skimp on these efforts when we are busy or tired — which is most of the time.

Ultimately, we just don’t invest much care in the simple, daily rituals that keep our mouths clean, healthy, and resilient. In part, perhaps, because we don’t fully appreciate the many ways in which our mouths both reflect and dictate the health of our entire bodies.

True fact: Many of the problems that show up in the mouth — from cavities and bad breath to weird tongue coatings and canker sores — are indicators of larger imbalances, deficiencies, and infections elsewhere in the body. The mouth is just one of many places where the symptoms happen to appear.

Similarly, many of the problems located in the mouth, like decayed or missing teeth and diseased gums, have significant negative downstream influences on other areas of the body.

The inflammation caused by periodontal disease, for example, can cause body-wide inflammation, triggering a resultant rise in cholesterol levels and immune-system activity while raising risks for atherosclerosis and heart disease. Gum disease is also a strong predictor of type 2 diabetes.

It’s not always clear whether an individual’s poor health and lifestyle habits led to a messed-up mouth, or whether poor oral health contributed to the messed-up state of his or her body. But two things are pretty evident: If you want to evaluate the state of your health, looking at (and smelling) your mouth is not a bad place to start. And if you want your body to be healthy, taking responsible care of your mouth is absolutely essential.

With that in mind, I’ll offer up my top five suggestions for a healthy mouth:

1) Make your body a temple. Most of us learned as kids that sweets and soda were bad for our teeth (because they encouraged dental plaque), but we were never taught about the important role whole-food nutrition plays in creating and maintaining healthy teeth and gums. The same things that create a healthy body create a healthy mouth, so making fresh whole foods and filtered water the basis of your diet is a powerful strategy for improving oral health. So is avoiding tobacco products, excessive alcohol, and soft drinks (look up “Mountain Dew mouth” if you don’t believe me). The other key: getting enough sleep. A study published in the Journal of Periodontology showed that lack of sleep was second only to smoking as a factor influencing the progression of periodontal disease.

2) Clean with care. Something like 40 percent of our teeth’s surfaces aren’t within reach of a toothbrush. And some of the nastiest bits that get caught between them can’t be gotten out except by careful flossing.

A really good electric toothbrush can help remove the stuff most manual brushing misses — if you use it properly. That means holding the brush stationary, in contact with a single small stretch of gumline, for a count of five before moving on to the next area.

Oil pulling (swishing coconut oil around in your mouth for several minutes and then spitting it out) is another good strategy. So is tongue cleaning. In one research study, using a tongue-scraping tool reduced smelly, sulfur-laden residues at the back of the tongue almost twice as well as brushing the area with a toothbrush. But even if you do all this, floss, too.

3) Rethink your oral-care products. Many long-trusted, brand-name products are full of industrial chemicals many health seekers would rather avoid, and some (like alcohol-based, germ-killing mouthwashes) can wreak havoc with the mouth’s delicate environment, drying out tissues and obliterating the good flora on which a healthy microbiome depends. I won’t even address the thornier debate about fluoride here, but suffice it to say, if you haven’t read up on concerns about conventional dental-care products recently, you might want to. And if you are still loyal to the brands your mom used, you might want to branch out or even start making your own simple products at home.

4) Address the root causes of bad breath. Often, halitosis starts with gum disease, but other common causes include digestive troubles, sinus or lung infection, yeast overgrowth, and other microbiome imbalances. If good, daily oral hygiene (see above) isn’t helping, consider looking for alternative explanations, including those outside your mouth. Remember, your mouth is just one end of a very long and biologically complex tube.

5) Consider consulting a holistic or integrative dentist. These dentists typically have significant additional training beyond dental school, and they see the mouth, jaws, throat, sinuses, and cranium within a larger, whole-person perspective. As a result, they often take a more multifactorial, nuanced approach to resolving dental challenges, and they look to the mouth as an indicator and driver of general well-being. For a good article on the field of holistic dentistry (and its critics), see Revolutionary Reading, below.

If all that seems like too much to take on, consider this: Reliably performing a good oral-hygiene ritual each morning and night is one of those self-regulatory “foundational habits” that is likely to predispose you to other healthy choices throughout the day. And if you’re skimping on this essential element of self-care, it’s worth asking: Where else am I undermining my health goals by not taking care of the fundamentals first? Just something to ponder while you are happily brushing, flossing, and tongue cleaning later on tonight.

Your body is smart. But it does not necessarily know what to do with the chemical compounds manufacturers have been adding to their products (or making the basis of their products) over the past several decades. And whether that newfangled chemical stuff is entering your body through your food, personal-care products, or household goods, the net result can be nasty.

Your body is a creative problem solver, though. So it might stash some of those chemicals in your fat cells. It might try to exude them through your skin. Or it might try to flush them out in your body’s waste streams (think sweat, urine, poo).

But all of that requires some doing on the part of your body. And a lot of things can go wrong along the way.

Like what, you ask? Well, some of those chemical compounds can irritate and inflame your body’s tissues (causing anything from skin rashes to gut leakage). They can also contribute to your body’s toxic load or “body burden,” which in turn puts an extra strain on your organs and immune system.

Some chemicals, known as neurotoxins (including many found in artificial sweeteners, colors and flavors, and preservatives), can mess with your brain and nervous system, causing severe headaches and fatigue, as well as mood and behavior problems.

Some compounds, known as endocrine disrupting chemicals (or EDCs for short), can mimic or confuse your body’s hormones, interfering with normal sexual development and reproductive function, and increasing the risks for certain types of abnormal growths (such as fibroids) and cancers.

A subclass of EDCs, affectionately known as “obesogens‚” can alter both appetite and metabolism, causing weight gain. Obesogens were recently named an “emerging threat to public health” in a research review published by the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology.

You might be thinking: But surely there’s no way that our government would allow anything but 100 percent safe and carefully tested chemicals in our food and body-care products! Isn’t that what the USDA and FDA are for? 

Here’s the nicest way I can put this: In principle, yes. In practice, alas, not so much.

The problem, as we’ve reported in a great many Experience Life articles over the years, is that the majority of chemicals used in conventional body-care products have never been tested for long-term safety (for more on that, see “Beauty Beware“). And even those studies that have been done on chemicals used in brand-name food and household cleaning and furniture products typically screen for evidence of immediate toxicity, not necessarily for the effects of repeated, long-term, or combined exposures.

In truth, even if our regulatory agencies tried harder, it would be almost impossible for them to study how all the various intermingling chemical compounds present in countless foods, cosmetics, and personal-care, cleaning, and household products might interact in the complex and constantly changing petri dish of the human body. We are talking about thousands of chemicals here, and an almost endless number of different exposure scenarios.

It’s worth noting that many of the chemicals that are widely used here in the United States are banned in the European Union. That’s because European manufacturers are required to observe what’s known as the Precautionary Principle, which dictates that chemicals must be presumed potentially dangerous until proven safe.

Here in the United States, we operate on the opposite assumption, regarding most chemicals as safe until they are proven dangerous. The problem with this strategy, of course, is that it turns U.S. consumers into guinea pigs —  unwitting subjects in a long-term “study” with a variety of negative implications for human health.

The net result: Most of us have our bodies bathed, inside and out, with potentially dangerous industrial chemicals on a daily basis. Some of those chemicals are routinely found not just in the blood and tissue samples of virtually all U.S. adults, but also in the umbilical cords of newborn babies.

Eager to clear some potentially dangerous chemicals out of your own body? Here are some ways to start:

• Make whole foods the center of your diet. Choosing single-ingredient whole foods and drinking simple, homemade, unsweetened beverages (like water, tea, and coffee) spares you from ingesting a great many chemical-laced ingredients and additives. Eating fresh or frozen whole foods also lets you avoid a lot of chemical preservatives (you’ll still want to wash or peel most produce, though, as it may have been sprayed or waxed or otherwise come into contact with chemical residues during storage and transport).
• Choose foods grown and raised in healthy environments. You want your food as free as possible from chemical pesticides, herbicides, antibiotics, and heavy metals. Certified organic and biodynamic foods are a good start, but you can also choose foods from growers whose methods you know and trust, or consider growing some of your own. Be aware that both wild and farmed fish, seafood, and meat products will typically contain traces of any chemicals or other pollutants present in those animals’ food and living environments, so choose your meat and seafood sources carefully.
• Use cleaner personal-care and household products. Whatever goes on your skin, hair, lips, and nails — along with pretty much everything else you touch, wear, or breathe — ends up on the inside of your body. So take a close look at the products you are using  on yourself and in your home. Weed out conventional, chemical-laden products in favor of certified organic, simply formulated, plant-based, or homemade options. Avoid dry-cleaned, flame-retardant, and other chemically treated fabrics: The chemicals used in those processes, along with nonstick coatings and plastic food-storage ingredients, are among the most commonly found in human blood and urine samples.
• Read ingredient labels carefully. Many products marketed as “natural” — or that use the word “organic” somewhere on the label — still may contain a host of troublesome ingredients, like parabens, phthalates, artificial fragrances, dyes, pigments, and petroleum byproducts that are anything but wholesome.
• Study up. The list of problematic chemicals is constantly evolving. For the best current guidance, check out the Environmental Working Group’s handy guides to cleaning up your food, personal-care products, and household goods (ewg.org/consumer-guides). Don’t trust a “seal of approval” unless you know what it means.
• Do a seasonal detox. Following a simple, whole-food detoxification program a few times a year (see below for a great one) can go a long way in helping your body dump what it doesn’t want and repair the damage done by toxic compounds. Commit to keeping your body’s elimination channels working smoothly on a daily basis by eating plenty of fiber-rich, colorful produce and drinking plenty of clean water.
• Final suggestion: Don’t panic. Once you’ve done what you can to reduce your chemical exposure, stop obsessing about it. Yes, our world is full of toxins. But stress and anxiety produce toxic chemical byproducts of their own. And the only one who can keep those out of your system is you.

Listen carefully, and you can hear your life speaking to you. Not just what it wants from you, but also what it wants for you.

Listen closely enough to the messages encoded in your body’s energy, instincts, and appetites (our cover subject, Danielle LaPorte, can teach you a thing or two about that), and you’ll perceive the GPS-like directions your internal compass is continually issuing: Proceed to the route. In 200 yards, turn left. Go 15.5 miles. Prepare to exit.

Whenever I hear my life issuing “prepare to exit” directions, I feel both angst and excitement. My response is one part “Oh, I guess this lovely trip is coming to an end” and one part “Ooh, goodie, we’re almost to our destination!”

This is one of those times. And I’m happy to say, this time I’m feeling a great deal more excitement than angst.

If you’ve been reading Experience Life for a while, you may recall that I stepped away from the editor-in-chief chair once before, back in 2013. Having founded the magazine in 2001, I’d been doing the job for more than a decade, and when Arianna Huffington invited me to come lead the Healthy Living vertical at the Huffington Post, I heard my internal GPS saying, “Turn here!” So I did.

Not long after, when I got a sense of New York City’s media scene, I decided that its personality and pace of life just weren’t for me. There wasn’t really space or time for me to do the deeper, subtler work that fed my heart and soul. My internal navigation chirped up: Now rerouting.

It was an eminently worthwhile voyage, in any case, because I came away with some solid-gold insights. I reclarified the core values I wanted to build my life around. I developed a new appreciation for how my quiet, Midwestern life allowed me to listen beyond the fray of popular culture and hear the subtle tapping of emerging realities that are so easily missed.

I realized just how profoundly I care about this magazine — about its mission, its readers, about the team that brings it to life each issue.

I recognized that because I have lived and breathed Experience Life for so long, I will always carry a bit of it with me in my bones. I also got very clear that if I wanted it to have a life that extended beyond me, I needed to invest a bit more of myself in preparing it for a promising future.

So over the past two years, I’ve been working closely with the whole Experience Life crew, and especially with our new editor in chief Jamie Martin (who has been an intrinsic and invaluable part of our team for more than a decade now), to create collective clarity about the magazine’s DNA and its raison d’ˆetre. Together, we’ve forged a strong go-forward plan.

As we’ve been drawing up our new map, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing a succession of terrific new issues hit the open road with less navigating (and far less back-seat driving) from me.

I’ve seen our new app-based digital edition take impressive form before my eyes. I’ve seen our newsstand sales skyrocket, and exciting new partnership possibilities come into view.

At the same time, I’ve found new mental space to explore the next leg of my own journey: the book that’s waiting to be finished; the podcast that’s just begun (a fun collaboration with Whole30 cofounder Dallas Hartwig — check out LivingExperiment.com for more info); the role I want to play in shaping the next era of healthy-life transformation.

So, what does this all mean for you? It means you’ll get to continue to enjoy this magazine’s special brand of healthy–happy wisdom for a long time to come. It means you’ll get the pleasure of getting to know Jamie and the whole EL team in new ways, and of noticing the fresh perspective they bring to these pages.

You haven’t seen the last of me, though! I’ll still be doing my “Revolutionary Acts” column and collaborating with this talented crew every chance I get.

Wanna stay in touch? Connect with me via the social channels below and at PilarGerasimo.com. I can’t wait to give you the turn-by-turn on what happens next. Meanwhile, to my team, to our readers, to Life Time and its visionary CEO, Bahram Akradi —  thank you, thank you, thank you.

It’s a freaky question with an equally freaky answer: Not many.

As the chart indicates, if you are healthy and flourishing — physically, mentally and emotionally — you are, statistically speaking, very much in the minority (almost certainly less than 20 percent, and arguably less than 3 percent — see below). Eek!

You can get more of the official facts and statistics in my feature “Being Healthy Is a Revolutionary Act: Renegade Perspectives for Thriving in a Mixed Up World.” But the main thing you gotta know is that if you are not one of the lucky few represented by those happy-healthy green figures, you needn’t beat yourself up about it.

Because, guess what? There’s a reason you’re struggling: You’ve got an entire culture working against you — one that has successfully undermined the well-being of fully 80 percent of the U.S. adult population to date. And (if recent data from the Mayo Clinic is correct) our social norms are on course to undermine the health of more like 97 percent of us in the not so distant future.

I know: Whaa?! That sounds crazy. And it is.

But the data is real: Study data published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings suggests that less than three percent of U.S. adults are eating even a marginally healthy diet, getting a reasonable amount of exercise, not smoking and maintaining a healthy body composition. And the study doesn’t even touch on equally huge health factors like stress, sleep and social connection. (For more on the findings, see this summary by Science Daily News.)

Fortunately, it’s not too late for you to break ranks with the unhealthy majority. That’s what the healthy revolution is all about: Cultivating healthy deviance (hey, I’m hashtagging that: #healthydeviance) from unhealthy norms.

I’m currently working on a book about how one can go about doing that on a daily basis. Meanwhile, just wanted to share this infographic-driven insight and let you mull on it a bit.

If the data boggles your mind as much as it does mine, please feel free share the chart to Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram or Twitter (handy social-sharing tools at left). But before you do, I invite you to imagine — for just a moment — what it might be like to live in a world where the ratios of healthy and not-so-healthy people were reversed.

What if 80 percent (or better yet, 97 percent!) of us were thriving, flourishing, enjoying a surplus of energy, vitality and resilience?

Imagine the difference that would make in our families and communities, schools, places of work. Imagine how it might improve our healthcare system, to say nothing of social justice, our environment and economy. Oh my goodness, it gives me goosebumps.

Wanna hear me talk more about this (and other stuff)? Listen in to the recent interview I did with Stupid Easy Paleo’s Steph Gaudreau on her terrific “Harder to Kill Radio” podcast.

I have learned to listen carefully now for a steely, strident voice that used to seep into my mind without my even realizing it. Sometimes it was a so-called expert telling me to “just say no” to a food or drink I loved. Sometimes it was a “just do it” ad campaign commanding me to exercise even when I didn’t feel up to it.

But just as often, it was my own internal voice telling me I “didn’t need” or “couldn’t have” or “didn’t deserve” something I wanted — a waffle, whipped cream, French fries, an extra hour of sleep, whatever.

For a while there, I worked hard on complying consistently with those steely-voiced directives. But the rewards and redemption they promised never materialized.

I’d be “good” and comply with all the prescribed yesses and nos for a few weeks. I’d feel disciplined and virtuous. Maybe even a little smug. But then I’d start feeling blah, bah-humbug, bummed out.

I was saying no to too many things I wanted, and yes to too many things I didn’t. The sense of deprivation and forced-march determination was sucking too much joy out of my life — and too much “me” out of me.

When I’d imagine a long, bleak future of no buttered popcorn, no waffles, no French fries — a future of gnarly, uncomfortable daily workouts (even when I was exhausted), a future of always rising at the crack of dawn (even if it was raining and I wanted to lie there listening to the drops fall) — I’d pretty much hate the prospect of that future. I’d hate myself for signing up for it, and I’d want out.

The problem was, I felt that if I didn’t do all those things, I couldn’t be a healthy person. And I wanted to be a healthy person. So I was stuck.

Worn down by my quest for perfection, I’d eventually say, “To heck with this; it’s not worth it.” I’d abandon my positive routines and healthy choices — and to make up for lost time and pleasure, I’d load up heavily on whatever I’d been denying myself.

Predictably, over the course of a few days or weeks, I’d sink into a low-vitality, grossed-out slog. And then the whole cycle would start all over again.

In either mode, I’d be bummed out because I wasn’t living the way I wanted to be living. I wasn’t feeling the way I wanted to feel. On the contrary, I was driving myself crazy.

It took a few years, but I eventually discovered that taking my orders from the steely, strident voices would set up this whole cascade of negative thoughts and behaviors that weren’t serving me in the slightest.

So one day I decided that striving for perfection really wasn’t a necessary or helpful goal. And I struck a new deal with myself: Rather than feeling compelled to make healthy choices all the time, I would simply make healthy choices most of the time.

I’d be as healthy as I could be, I decided, while also being happy. For me, it turned out, that meant making healthy choices about 85 percent of the time.

This wasn’t about having a planned “cheat” day or meal. I didn’t want to have to cheat. Instead, I struck a deal with myself: I would say my own “yes” or “no” in the moment, based on my own sense of instinct and desire.

The only stipulation was that I needed to stay present and actually take pleasure in whatever I was choosing, and I needed to be able to do this while also remaining conscious of my larger healthy-life goals.

That was harder than it sounds. Remaining present and conscious in this way wasn’t something I had a lot of practice with — because indulging in unhealthy things was something I mostly did in an unconscious mode, while tuning out my higher goals.

Like many, I acted out most of my unhealthy choices in what psychologists refer to as “disassociated” mode — while watching TV or driving, or inhabiting some weird fugue state.

Deciding to do something “forbidden” while also staying conscious of my body and cognizant of my larger commitment to health felt downright weird at first. But it worked some real magic.

Once I knew I could have whatever I really wanted (as long as I stayed conscious), here’s what happened:

• I stopped sneaking and cheating and disassociating myself out of my enjoyments, and I started fully experiencing them instead.
• I began really tasting and feeling what I was eating, and noticing when my appetite was sated. (Research suggests that eating while distracted not only causes us to eat about 10 percent more in the moment, it also results in our eating 25 percent more later in the day, presumably because we have very little sense of what we actually ate.) My appetite got healthier as a result.
• I began heeding my body’s desires about movement and rest. I no longer drove myself to exhaustion; I let myself be drawn by my available energy in the moment, and I’d rest or shift gears when it flagged.
• Most important, I stopped telling myself, “I can’t have this; I must do that.” I stopped listening to those steely, perfection-seeking voices, and I started aiming to make 85 percent of what I did 100 percent awesome.

What did that look like in practice? My daily plates would be filled with healthy choices, but they might be garnished with some delightful folly. The majority of my meals would be wholesome, but every once in a while: “What’s this? Someone made fondue!?”

Same thing with fitness: Eight or nine times out of 10, I’d do my scheduled workouts as planned. And the rest of the time . . . meh: I might do something else that day, or nothing at all.

My time-and-energy management worked similarly: I’d get up at my planned early hour most days, but every once in a while, if it was raining, or the light on the wall was especially lovely, or I needed the sleep, I might stay in bed a while longer.

Finding my own happy place required experimentation. I had to develop a whole new set of muscles for noticing and moderation. But it worked. Both my health and happiness trend lines started moving upward, and they just kept going.

Interested in trying this approach for yourself? Here are my tips:

• Don’t panic about your percentage. I like aiming for 85 percent. My friend Mark Hyman, MD, recommends going for 90 percent. But who really knows what 85 percent versus 90 percent looks like from one person to the next? For you, 70 percent might be a whole lot better than what you’re doing now. Improvement and consistency over time are what matter. Your healthy choices will get easier and more rewarding as you go.
• Respect your reality. The occasional croissant may provide pleasure for many, but for a person with a severe gluten issue, it could spell agony. Enjoying a whiskey now and then might be no big deal for one person, but for an alcoholic, it could be devastating. You’re going for health and happiness here, not agony and devastation. If you sense you have an eating disorder, addiction, or medical problem, get professional help.
• Observe outcomes. Periodically assess whether you are making progress, holding your own, or backsliding into a place you don’t want to be. Adjust your approach (and your aimed-for percentages) accordingly.

So, what’s the right healthy–happy balance for you? What’s your own “perfect” percentage right now? There’s only one way to find out.