As one of the leading physician advocates for using food as medicine, reaching many tens of millions through my website and my book Effortless Healing, you may think I have always been a healthy eater. The truth is that I haven’t.I was raised eating the typical American diet – bread, chips, doughnuts, and dessert after nearly every meal. I also had cavities in half my teeth filled with mercury before I reached adulthood. My face and back were riddled with acne.

Yet I didn’t connect the dots between what I ate and my symptoms until well into my medical career. This was largely due to the effective media and marketing strategies of the junk food companies – strategies that are even more effective today.

When I started my medical practice thirty years ago, I thought the best way to address patient’s health complaints was to write a prescription.

My first wake-up call came from The Yeast Connection by William Crook, M.D. When I first read it in the mid-1980s, I ignored Crook’s nutritional advice and only prescribed antifungal drugs as treatment for yeast overgrowth. Not surprisingly, my approach failed miserably. Ten years later, I read the book again. This time, the nutritional guidance hit home. I started counseling my patients to change what they ate, and saw their symptoms evaporate.

That catalyzed a new direction for me as I traveled across the country nearly every month to conferences to learn how to apply nutrition to my medical practice. This new information worked and many of my patients started getting better.

It became clear that I could only treat tens of thousands of patients so I started a website to share this information that now reaches over ten million individuals every month. I refined my role from being an expert responsible for ‘fixing’ patients to an educator who helps people unlock their own healing potential.

My staff and I review nearly a thousand articles a week and publish summaries and my commentary on the best ones in my daily newsletter. I also interview many of the leading health experts in the world.

Very few people have the time to read a thousand health articles a week which is why I started the newsletter. But I also realized many don’t have the time to review all my old newsletters and would like a condensed summary of the core principles on how to regain your health and not have to be in constant pain and take medications every day.

That is why I’ve distilled my learning and experience into 9 healing principles in my new book Effortless Healing. The top five are:

Drink pure water.Too many people are drinking soda, sports drinks and enhanced water, exposing themselves to enormous amounts of sugar and health-harming chemicals. Replacing these beverages with pure water is an incredibly powerful change.

Eat more veggies. Vegetables are an excellent source of hydration, nutrients and fiber, yet far too many of us eat far too few. Juicing, eating them raw and fermenting are all effortless ways to eat more of these nutritional powerhouses.

Burn fat for fuel.When you eat more high-quality fats (from sources such as grass-fed beef, olives and raw, organic dairy) you help your body heal from insulin resistance, banish sugar cravings and drop excess pounds.

Exercise less and gain more benefit.Research shows that the most impactful way to boost hunger-regulating, fat-burning and energy-promoting hormones is to do short bursts of high intensity exercise. Which means you no longer have to find hours to spend on the treadmill.

Enjoy the sun and get your Vitamin D.We have shunned the sun to the point that most of us are dramatically deficient in vitamin D. This vital nutrient plays a crucial role in immunity, and supplement forms aren’t nearly as effective as the vitamin D your skin manufactures when exposed to sunlight.

I go into each of these steps—plus four more--in much greater detail in Effortless Healing. I also cover these topics in depth on Mercola.com. If you have read this far, I hope you will continue educating yourself by using one or both of these additional resources.

Remember, your body is an exquisite machine that is tuned to create health. The question to ask each time you prepare to eat or decide when to go to bed or what type of exercise to do is: Do I want to degenerate, or regenerate? The choice – and the power – is yours.