By his senior year, my best friend was probably our high school's best football player and unquestionably its best artist. The poster he painted of an iconic Sports Illustrated cover - a soaring Sydney Moncrief about to unleash a tomahawk dunk for the Arkansas Razorbacks - was so lifelike, for example, that it passed for a photograph from 10 paces.

After college, my buddy moved to Minneapolis, one of the best-paying areas for graphic artists at that time. The first time he returned home, he showed me magazine ad after magazine ad he had created for Fortune 500 companies. He boasted about the big bucks he made - and the price he paid to earn them.It was not uncommon, he said, for him to work all night to beat a deadline. Once, he didn't sleep for 72 hours.When I next saw him three years later, he looked haggard, heavy, and not very healthy. He showed me no magazine ads, did no boasting. Instead, he said: "Once, I wanted to be wealthy and famous. Now, I just want to sleep in like everybody else."I remembered my buddy's words because one of the "jobs" you've chosen can easily frazzle you. It might even wear you down to the point where you see a buddy and say, "Once, I wanted to be healthy and fit. Now, I just want to eat junk like everybody else."But don't do it. Eating healthy consistently - unlike the typical Americans who make up my buddy's "everybody else" - has so many benefits that I should write 871 pages rather than 871 words about it. Yet just because I could go into such depth doesn't mean your eating strategy needs to be detailed and difficult.You can be very successful by keeping things simple.One way: Don't try to commit all the statistics from the latest studies to memory. Simply create a clever saying from them.And based on some of the recent studies I've read, your first clever saying could be: "Drink more coffee; eat less meat.Our view of coffee has changed significantly. When I was a boy, my parents were advised to stop drinking it as a way to lower their blood pressure and reduce the odds of heart disease. Now we know that unless you're highly sensitive to caffeine, the increase in blood pressure should be slight and temporary and that regular coffee consumption could even protect against heart disease.Here's why.Calcium in the arteries can cause the plaque that creates the heart disease that adversely affects more than 15 million Americans. A Korean study recently published in the journal Heart found that drinking three to five cups daily - an amount that creates minimal health risks, according to the 2015 Guidelines Committee - reduced the likelihood of artery calcium by 41 percent when compared to non-coffee drinkers.Additionally, the results of a major meta-analysis last year linked coffee consumption to heart health so strongly that it became the focal point of a presentation, titled "Coffee & Health," given at the European Association for Cardiovascular Prevention & Rehabilitation's 2015 Congress. In the aforementioned meta-analysis that considered nearly one million people and was published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, a lower incidence of death from heart disease was connected to moderate coffee consumption. Those consuming three cups of coffee a day, for example, had a 21 percent reduced risk of dying from heart disease when compared to non-coffee drinkers.Consuming four cups a day - compared to not drinking any at all - provided the most protection against all causes of death, including those that occur from being obese or overweight, the current condition of just slightly more than every two out of three adult Americans.A relatively easy way to rein in your weight is to reduce meat consumption. This first became clear from seminal studies performed on Seventh-Day Adventists, a religious group of approximately 18 million worldwide members, 35 percent or so who follow the religion's recommendation to not eat meat. (That additional research by the U.S. National Institutes of Health found the typical Seventh-Day Adventist in California lives between four and 10 years longer than other Californians merits mention.)A recent review appearing in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, supports the Seventh-Day Adventists studies, finding that vegetarian diets created greater weight reduction - 4.4 pounds - than weight-loss diets that permitted the consumption of meat.While results from the highly controversial Atkins diet were included in this study, so were more moderate eating plans, such as the one recommended by the American Dietetic Association.In short, I hope you always strive to be as healthy and fit as possible. But as the story about my buddy suggests, strive too hard to accomplish something and you can not only burn out but also adversely affect your health.So also strive to simplify. One way: Create a catchy saying that contains a couple keystones to health and fitness. Say it over and over until it becomes second nature.For starters, feel free to borrow the one I suggested today. "Drink more coffee, eat less meat" isn't hard to follow and provides immediate as well as long term health-and-fitness benefits.