Khnum Stic Ibomu - The 5 Principles: a Revolutionary Path to Health, Inner Wealth, and Knowledge of Self

This is your life. How you live it is up to you.

But the truth is, it aint gonna last forever, and as we age, things are going to get more challenging healthwise, like it or not. How we take care of ourselves now will likely be the biggest determining factor in how well we age. The stress we carry, the unhealthy foods we binge on, the toxic substances we party with, the workouts we skip, the breaks we didnt take, and the lack of healthy disciplines in our lives all come with a price. Every unhealthy choice we make adds on to that tab until one day, its time to pay up.

The average life span in the US is about seventy-nine years. I think that number is well below what could be possible with a holistic and healthy lifestyle, but based on how the average person is living, those are the numbers, and the numbers dont lie. But even for those who make it to seventy-nine years, how many of those years are lived in vibrant health? People are being diagnosed younger and younger with all sorts of preventable diseases and conditions.

I want to acknowledge those sad stats, but I promise you this aint a book based on fear and scare tactics. Not at all. We all presumably want to live a long, healthy, and meaningful life, right? The bad news is that nobody can predict the future, but the great news is there are some very, very simple principles and practices that we can implement in our lives to help us thrive. This is a book about the positive and revolutionary effects of a healthy lifestyle. This is not a book about what the physical body looks like or this trending diet versus that diet, this book is about the journey of well-rounded well-being.

Even though my day job for the last couple decades has been a hip-hop artist and producer with dead prez, a lot of people may not know Im a certified long-distance running coach and a longtime student of the martial arts, or why and how I became so passionate about health and fitness in the first place. The many disciplines I talk about at length in the chapters to come have revolutionized my health, fitness, mindset, and life. But even more importantly, I wanted to take my personal transformation and all my experiences in martial arts, running, plant-based nutrition, meditation, and more and break them down into a gang of actionable takeaways for you to get your own personal benefits from them. You dont have to be a martial artist or a runner to benefit, and you dont have to be perfectIm sure not. You just have to stay focused. Focus is one of my strengths, and I believe these principles can deeply inspire you to focus on your well-being on a whole new level. And hopefully what we heal in our own selves, well heal in the family tree to come as well.

The World Health Organization defines health as a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or sickness, and thats right in alignment with what my experience, experiments, and being a guinea pig for a nutritionist and holistic health counselor for almost thirty years have taught me. You especially see this when you start taking care of elders in your family as early as in their sixties, struggling with preventable health issues. When you see how quickly poor lifestyle habits develop into chronic illness, it gives you perspective. It aint gotta be like that. The medical system got drugs to treat the symptoms, but then you need drugs for the side effects of the drugs, and before you know it, your organs, your kidneys and liver, are destroyed. What is the cure? That old adage is true: an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. Living a long time is one thing, but living those years vibrantly well, thats the real goal. I see it like this: if its in the master plan for my life, Imma do all I can to be thriving, naturally, into the triple digits!