Title: Live as Long as You Dare! A Journey to Gain Healthy, Vibrant Years
Author: Leonard Heflich
Publisher: ‎ PageTurner Press and Media
ISBN: 978-1638715252
Pages‏: ‎ 240
Genre: Self-Help
Reviewed by: David Allen

Read Book Review

For years friends have been sending me advice, reading suggestions, and blogs on what to eat, how to live well, how to live. For my part I’ve been studying these matters independently, archiving what reasonable wisdom I could find – taking the best and leaving the rest. I never imagined I could find ‘one stop shopping’ of all of these important areas reasonably subsumed and presented in one book, under one roof.

The search is over.  Leonard Heflich’s superb book Live as Long as You Dare! A Journey to Gain Healthy, Vibrant Years, is the Holy Grail of smart living, smart nutrition, and optimal health; literally. Heflich brings his forty years’ experience as consumer, chemist and nutrition scientist to bear in this concise, highly readable and totally informative volume.

The book’s opening chapters describe how the author and others have roundly succeeded at living the good life. Put aside the drivel and banalities that many self-help and higher wisdom volumes offer. Dipping knowledgeably and tastefully into sources ranging from Lao Tse to Keith Richards to Winston Churchill, the author shares his wide reading and intelligent life style choices with his readers.

This is the kind of book you will underline, highlight, and take notes from. There is fare for every appetite here. Within the short space of 200 plus pages, Heflich reviews topics that most of us have wondered about for years: exercise, fasting, diet, meditation, vitamins, antioxidants, and how to prolong and boost the quality of our lives. Heflich reasonably advocates moderation and passion in everything we do. His expert brush strokes touch upon the unfortunate but not necessarily inadvertent baggage of aging, including hypertension, heart disease, obesity, and joint disease. He makes a convincing argument for not giving up.

Much to his credit, the author does not chastise or minimize the benefits of Western medicine and science (as do so many other writers and self-promoters.) Instead, he points out where additional knowledge about nutrition and life style augment our visits to the internist. Further, he never sacrifices complexity for the sake of simplicity. He provocatively reviews what he considers myths about dietary fat, dietary sugar, even reconciling seemingly opposed schools of thought (for example, in his summary of the Atkins diet vs. that proposed by Dean Ornish.) The amazing quotes seasoning the book, as well as the appendix (featuring recipes – check out Heflich’s kale lasagna), and list of practical ‘tiny steps’ which in composite add to health and years, are also a nice touch.  Live as Long as You Dare! A Journey to Gain Healthy, Vibrant Years  is a great book to motivate you to make positive, healthy changes.