"The first wealth is health." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

The elevator to success is out of service. But the stairs are always open.

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.

In practice, strictly making health #1 has real social and business ramifications. That's a price I've realized I MUST be fine with paying, or I will lose weeks or months to sickness and fatigue. Making health #1 50% of the time doesn't work. It's absolutely all-or-nothing. If it's #1 50% of the time, you'll compromise precisely when it's most important not to.

A healthy body is one of life's most precious possessions. It's so easy to ignore our health; but without good health, the other blessings of life can't be enjoyed to their fullest. I know you're saying, 'Art, I don't have time for all that exercise stuff.' Please take time. You can't afford not to. When you abuse your body, everyone around you suffers because you aren't your best.

Sleep can determine whether your body is printing out the cells of a sexy beast or the cells of a wildebeest.

A man's health can be judged by which he takes two at a time - pills or stairs.

If life is truly important and meaningful, then health must be a top priority. Health, not gold and silver, is wealth! Health is not merely the momentary absence of disease or injury; it's the best possible physical and mental state of a human being. Everyone who ever became fit did so through a thousand simple decisions - decisions they made every day to move, to exercise, to purge their imperfections, to eat the healthiest foods, and to structure their lives in pursuit of important goals.

If you own a sports car, a power boat, or any highly tuned machine, you know to be v-e-r-r-r-r-y careful what you feed it. Yet these are simple devices compared with the human body. If you want optimum sports performance the first rule is: Don't put junk fuel in your Maserati. Your muscles, bones, organs, even the enamel in your teeth are all rebuilt continuously out of what you eat, drink, and breathe. Over 98% of the you that is reading this page is entirely reconstructed from the substances that entered your body during the last 12 months, including the man-made chemicals, particulate matter, and toxic gases in your air. The quality of your body structure and its performance is dependent on the quality of what you put into it. To the degree that the air you breathed was polluted last year, so is your flesh today.

I think of the swimming pool as the perfect metaphor for the human body. Each pool has a pump (heart), a filter (kidneys), water (the body is about 60 percent water), and a liner (skin). If I pumped gallons and gallons of coffee instead of water into a swimming pool every day, it would soon get sick, and the pool would turn green. The filtration system of a pool is designed to remove leaves, sand, sweat, and bacteria; it wasn't designed to remove coffee. Your body's filtration system was designed to metabolize foods found in nature, not to process the residues from laboratory-engineered substances like high-fructose corn syrup or most of the processed foods we eat. The human body is much smaller than a swimming pool, and to avoid contamination, you must eat healthy and less, drink healthy and less, sleep long enough and well enough, exercise daily, stay committed, and maintain a great attitude. A pool without that approach is not a pool you want to swim in.

Your body will always function better if your daily calories come from clean, wholesome foods, prepared as close to their natural state as possible. Think about it. All that butter, lard, mayonnaise, french fries and candy going down your throat is like pouring a bucket of mud into your bathroom sink and expecting the drain to work right.