You: The Owner's Manual - An Informative Book For Wellness

I would consider this book to be ‘required reading’ for anyone who would like to have the know-how and motivation to take charge of their health, live longer, and enjoy themselves while doing so. It would make a great gift for anyone in your life, including yourself.

You: The Owner’s Manual—the title sums up the book quite nicely: it’s applicable to everyone, it tells us everything we need to know, and it’s cute. This book tells us what we would expect to read in a book on wellness, things like how our health can be impacted by our habits, and what we can do to stay healthier. However, it also tells us so much more, like how all of the systems in the body work, how systems we may not even think about can be impacted by our lifestyle, and how this can affect our overall health. The book explains these complex topics in ways that make us actually want to read about potentially dry biological facts: simply, and with humor.

You: The Owner’s Manual is a fantastic book for stress management because it explains how stress impacts overall health, and provides doable plans for developing healthier lifestyle habits, which will impact not only stress, but longevity and overall quality of life. In this way, stress management is not the main goal of the book, but an important part of a path that leads to the greater goal of aging well, so the result is that the reader is left with less stress and more healthy years ahead.

The book also provides the motivation for making these changes, which ultimately is what can fuel the effort. Consider these facts from the book:

• "You control more than 70 percent of how well and how long you live. By the time you reach fifty, your lifestyle dictates 80 percent of how you age; the rest is controlled by inherited genetics."
• "If you make five—just five—adjustments to your life, you can have a dramatic effect on your life expectancy and quality of life…if you can do these five things, in the next ten years you have just a 10 percent chance of dying or having to suffer disability compared to a typical person your age."
• "The five things are: controlling your blood pressure; avoiding cigarettes; exercising thirty minutes a day; controlling stress; and following an easy-to-love healthy diet."

The book is full of science that motivates, like these statements, but it’s also full of information and ideas on how you can make the suggested healthy changes a reality in your life.