The Daniel Plan - Review
Rick Warren is the lead pastor at Saddleback Church in Southern California. His most popular work, The Purpose Driven Life, is one of the bestselling books of all time and has been translated into more than fifty languages. The book was written over ten years ago and has inspired millions to live better, God honoring, lives. The Daniel Plan is Warren's greatest literary push since the publication of The Purpose Driven Life over a decade ago. I was interested to see what might compel such a successful leader and author to jump back in the fray and healthy living seems to be the impetus for his next work.
The Daniel Plan is not a strategy for eating vegetables and water for ten days as described in the Bible (Daniel Chapter 1). It is a holistic plan for healthy living that enlists the reader to consider faith, food, fitness, focus, and friends. Warren shares a personal story where he became convicted about his personal health and the health of his church. Short term diets did not produce the results he desired and thus the Daniel Plan was born. Warren enlisted the skills of professional doctors, in chorus with his own pastoral insight, to create the content for the next big thing from the California based ministry.
The result of Warren's efforts is ambitious. The Daniel Plan aims to bring balance to the five aforementioned areas of life that generally include everything you are and everything you do. The book is well organized and describes philosophical and practical concepts. Reading The Daniel Plan is not the same thing as participating in a 40 day challenge. It is an introduction, or guide, to the plan that can be followed up on after you read the book. The Daniel Plan is written for beginners in every area of faith, food, fitness, focus, and friends. The content is consistently elementary which makes it accessible to the broadest possible audience; it also makes the book feel pedestrian. Simply put: Warren's ideas are too big for their binding. The essential of food read like a pop-culture guide to "eating raw." Faith described some basics of Christian living while focus consisted of a variety of alliterative anecdotes toward actual advice.
Warren's ideas are too big for their binding.
I would recommend this book for people who don't know where to start. There is an idea in here that you can definitely latch on to. Warren has created a great tool to survey holistic healthy living. Its width far exceeds its depth and leaves the reader feeling lost. The additional tools including, journals, recipe books, and videos may help flesh out the ideas espoused in The Daniel Plan. Don't get me wrong: the plan would drastically change anyone's life who is able to follow it. But the book suffers as one product amid an economy of Daniel Plan resources.