Annamaya-Kosha : health is wealth!

A)     Before you start

• First and foremost, get want you want out of life and fulfill your dreams. Get the job you want, or do what you have always wanted to do to earn a living. Self-actualize yourself. Stop being in a rut and snap out of it. You cannot be healthy unless you are happy and relaxed. Start early (catcah yourself young), and plan and live your life exactly as you want and see how everything falls into place. You cannot be healthy unless you eliminate the stress-hormone cortisol. That is the main culprit for storing fat. That leads to the second point of de-stressing.
• Take a chill pill. Say no. Let go. Never try to be a super-human. Stop trying to make everyone happy. You don't need a certificate from one and all to live on Earth. Stop giving in to unrealistic expectations. Give up multi-tasking. Make your own well-being your priority. That is normal survival instinct : to hell with moral science! You should actually do the following.
• Vent out : dissipate out all negative energies from within. Join a debate club, write fiery blogs, dance/run till you sweat-bathe every evening, get even with someone who rubbed you the wrong way, show the middle finger to someone who deserves it, don't ever take shit from anyone. Finish taking healthy revenges. Completely avoid people who piss you off. End some friendships for your own happiness and sanity. Socialize only with positive, supportive and encouraging people; never with the boring, unhappy, sarcastic and jealous ones. You have the right and duty to keep yourself happy. Don't put up with jerks and douche-bags. Get morons out of the way. Show the jerk his/her place. With all the negative energies dissipated out, go to the next step towards your own self.
• Take charge of your life. Develop agency of your being. Be aware and alert about everything about yourself. Nurture your meta-cognition. Become conscious of your sub-conscious. 
• Understand your body as a very complex biochemical machine, with three aspects : agni (food and digestion), gati (thinking, action, locomotion) and sheetal (sleep, repair, restoration). Your health is a balanced combination of food, activity, and sleep. Increasing one at the cost of others is harmful to health. Eating too much without activity is incorrect. Working too much while compromising on sleep is also incorrect. Exercising too much without proper nutrition and sleep is again incorrect. Over-eating and starving are both incorrect. Oversleeping and being sleep-deprived are also incorrect. Get these three aspects in place. 
• Make your body a project, a responsibility. Educate yourself about food, digestion, assimilation, activity, sleep. Learn about general human physiology, biological clock, macro-nutrients, metabolism, hormones; and then your own specific nutrient/calorie, activity, and sleep requirements. Educate yourself about the digestive system and the skeletal-muscular system. Find out which part of your body needs which nutrient to grow and function well. Learn how carbohydrates run the system, fats lubricate the system, and proteins build the system. Educate yourself about micro-nutrients, also. Are you getting sufficient calcium, iron, sodium, iodine, etc.? If you don't get Vitamin B (1-12), the body will never be at its peak efficiency. Learn what kind of activity you need : do you need aerobic or anaerobic? How long and how frequent should each type of exercise be? 
• Get your health numbers correct. First do a check of your current health. Meet a physician for a blood test, including a lipid profile test. From the report, check what is expected. How much should your resting heart rate be? How much should your resting metabolism be? Given your lifestyle, what should be your daily calorie requirement? Given your frame (S/M/L), what should your BMI be? What should your ideal body-fat percentage be? What should your RBC (red blood count), WBC (White blood count), Lipid Profile (Cholesterol-HDL, LDL, Triglycerides) be?
• Overeating is the bloody cause of all God-damned diseases. Stop eating for entertainment : find other way to satisfy your sensory pleasures. Visit any mall and you will the food court is the most crowded. People of gorging on junk, which are bathed in the worst kind of fats. Watch carefully, and you will not find much difference between this compulsive eating and doing drugs. In the food court, people eat even if they are not hungry. They are eating that burger/pizza only to announce it later in social media. Eating is entertainment now, not fueling of the body. Bored people eat more and become couch potatoes, lounging and munching junk. Actually, it is the lazy people who are easily bored : active people have so much in their agenda that they are excited and upbeat all the time. Have you seen famous and successful people doing this? You will not see an Ambani or a Tata or a famous sportsperson gorging on a burger. Don't live to eat. Eat to live a wholesome life. Follow hobbies, do exciting things, make boring (but necessary) jobs interesting, try new challenges (whether public speaking or rock-climbing), socialize (minus munching), learn some new skill, do something differently just for the fun of it. Do something new everyday. 
• Fix a daily routine. Wake up and go to bed at a fixed time. Eat at a fixed time. Workout at a fixed time. Defecate at a fixed time (morning, of course!). 

B)      Basics

• Turn inwards. Spend time alone regularly. Observe you body. Do not be entitled : the body does not owe you to remain perfect. You owe it to the body to keep it as good as possible. Pay attention to signals. Are you skin, hair, nails, ok? Are your meal and sleep timings regular? Are you feeling low-energy without being sick?(Red flag!). Is your posture correct? Is your gait correct or do you have hip/knee/ankle pain at the end of the day? Are you breathing deeply? Are you craving for tea/coffee more than two times a day? This means your energy is not coming from the usual glycogen stores of the liver (stored form the previous meal), and you need a zero-nutrition stimulant. 
• Understand the simple titration experiment in the school Chemistry lab. Picture yourself holding two test tubes : Tube A of acid (colorless) and Tube B of alkali (pink). Now, slowly (drop by drop) pour the acid into the alkali. After several drops, the alkali is neutralized and turns colorless. We stop pouring the acid at that instant. Pour insufficient acid and the alkali remains pink (still alkaline). Pour too much acid and the solution becomes acidic. It is a careful task to pour exactly the required amount of acid to just completely neutralize the alkali, no more. The color dye immediately indicates that the neutralization is over by changing color from pink to colorless. 
  Now extend this picture to your digestion process. Your plate of food is Tube A and your stomach is Tube B. Your send the food to the stomach where the stomach acid begins digesting it. Pour too much food too soon and the stomach, the intestines, the liver, and the pancreas get overloaded, unable to handle the quantity. It is a careful task to eat exactly that much amount which your body is hungry for at that time, no more. The brain needs 15-20 min to indicate that you are full and therefore stop eating. It is this tiny crucial window where all the overeating happens!
• Listen to your inner system and obey its signals : Which foods are giving you acidity/bloating/uneasiness/headache/cloying sensation? Which foods are preventing you from smooth defecation next morning? Which foods are keeping you from falling asleep even after 11 pm?  Avoid them altogether. Are you not feeling hungry in the morning? (You must have had a big greasy dinner). Which foods are making you feel drowsy after lunch? 
• Listen to your digestive system : are you burping the taste of the same food even two hours after you had it? This means that is lying undigested in the stomach itself, torturing it well beyond its working duration and capacity. You body is not ready to take it. It is very important not to stress those systems over which you do not have voluntary control. (Most of the digestive system consists of involuntary muscles.)
• Listen to your large intestine : the time taken to defecate should be the same as that of urination. Defecating in installments, without or with gas, is a strong signal of improper digestion. Constipation is another warning. You ate the wrong food, which your system cannot tolerate. Thumb rule : eat what you have been always eating since childhood. 
• Don't shock your body : Your body is way too complex to adjust to your individual whims and indulgences. This complex system (phylum : vertebrata) was designed millions of years ago and has since become more evolved and complicated : you cannot hijack its dharma in something as short as an average human lifespan.

C)      Food 

• Understand how your body uses food as a fuel. The food digested in the stomach and assimilated through the small intestine, is stored in the liver as glycogen for immediate use. When the glycogen stores run low, you begin to feel hungry. Take it longer and the fat stores start burning (Fig.1). But you douse you hunger immediately with a carbohydrate and the insulin steps in and halts fat burning. So what should you do? Not eat? Of course you should. But with a sufficient gap between meals (say at least 4 hours). And eat slow, complex (low-GI) carbs. GI = glycemic index, which indicates how fast it raises blood sugar. Blood sugar must rise slowly upon eating, not spike. Roti and Rice are low-GI, sugar and maida are high-GI. Low-GI carbs keep you satiated for a longer time, postponing hunger, increasing the duration of fat-burning between meals. In Fig.1, the aim/challenge is to reach the body-fat-burning zone.

                                    Fig. 1

• Learn to grocery-shop, green-grocery shop, and cook. Organize your stocks, store, and refrigerator. Arrange your cutlery and crockery. Be in full control of everything going inside your body. Eat out once a month, at the most, if at all. 
• You must feel hungry before you think of taking a break for eating. Yes, even if it is breakfast. Let the hunger develop for 15-20 min. Then start eating slowly and calmly. Do not jump on the food desperately. You are not going to die if you starve for 30 min. Do not attack your stomach and pelt it with food. Eating is not an epic mission to accomplish!
• Eat less : as simple as that. Living beings are not designed to eat so much as socio-culture and food-industry has made us believe. Our livers are capable of pulling off a skipped meal by continuing to provide you with glycogen. The liver stores require about 24 hours to be fully depleted!
• Eat slowly. Do not open your mouth wide to gobble the food. The gap between your upper and lower teeth must be just the size of your thumb's width. Otherwise, your morsels are too big. 
• Chew well. Be conscious of this till it becomes a habit. Feel the food travel along the incisors to the molars and become the 'bolus'. Then swallow. 
• Don't let your stomach stretch upon eating : limit the quantity. You actually require much less food than you are stuffing. If you don't have food like medicines, you have to have medicines like food.
• For a relaxing weekend, eat even less. What do you need the energy for on a lounging day?
• Drink huge quantities of water. Keep sipping it at every 15-20 min. Soak mint/basil leaves in it and drink more.
• Reduce the size of your dinner by nearly half. The body is winding down to sleep and does not need the carbohydrate/fat fuel. Protein is perfect for its overnight repair and restoration activities.
• Distinguish between 'real hunger' and 'fake hunger', and eliminate the latter. 
• Eliminate deep frying. Avoid all junk like pizza, patties, burger, chips, etc. These are poison.
• Understand the type of fats and amount of cholesterol present in your food : Saturated Fatty Acid (SFA), Mono-unsaturated fatty acid (MUFA), and Poly-unsaturated fatty acid (PUFA). Have those which are all low as possible in SFA, the bad fat. Have those with higher MUFA and PUFA (good fats),  sparingly.  
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• Avoid sugar like poison. This is crucial. Sugar is as addictive as drugs, if not more. It is the legal cocaine. Sugar creates a vicious cycle : the more you have it, the more you crave for it. It spikes insulin exponentially, but burns off quickly. The reactionary insulin lingers much longer, causing 'fake hunger'. 
• Give up sweets / ice-creams / cold drinks / pastry / cakes / chocolates. It spikes the insulin into your bloodstream, preventing fat from burning. Stored fat can burn only and only in the absence of insulin. So remember every time you dump anything sweet in your mouth that you just postponed fat-burning by several hours! The more complex the carbohydrate, the smaller and blunter the insulin rise, which wears off sooner, thereby quickly resuming fat burning. Natural sugars like fruits and honey can be had during breakfast. Packaged fruit juices also contain added sugars : check the nutrition label. 

• Follow the food pyramid. 
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• Understand how your liver and pancreas work. You eat a complex carbohydrate (Low Glycemic index (GI)), the blood sugar slowly rises; and so does the insulin (with some phase lag with respect to the blood sugar), opening muscles cells to intake the food energy. Insulin is the gatekeeper of muscle cells. After digestion through stomach, duodenum, and small intestine; the assimilated nutrition is transferred through the hepatic portal vein into the liver, where it is stored for immediate use (e.g. it can fuel a 30-min cardio workout). If not utilized, it is converted into fat! Therefore, eat only as much as you require at that time of the day (depending on your activity level). A blunt, low rise in blood insulin wears off quickly, restarting (stored) fat burn for energy. On the other hand, you eat a simple (high-GI) carbohydrate, the blood sugar spikes, leading to a corresponding insulin spike, which decays slowly to zero, long after the blood sugar is gone. Lack of blood sugar and yet presence of insulin causes you to snack, spiking the blood sugar and the insulin right back up again. You end up flooding your bloodstream with insulin repeatedly during the whole day. More the insulin secretion, the more your muscle cells get resistant/indifferent to insulin over time, requiring more amount of insulin to actually assimilate the energy from the blood sugar. The more the insulin in the blood, the longer it takes to subside to finally allow fat-burning to resume. It is a vicious circle, and a downward spiral. Any surprises why obesity is rising? It is the wrong eating routines and eating the wrong types of food (high GI, low nutrition). Please commit this to memory : Presence of insulin in the bloodstream prevents the burning of stored fat.
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• Make sure your overnight fast is for at least 10 hours. Better still, make it 12 hours. Have your dinner by 7 pm and breakfast after 7 am. 
• Stop snacking every now and then. Stop torturing your stomach and liver. Have satiating breakfast and moderate lunch, and the dinner will dwindle with time. 
• Fast for a day every other weekend. Eat fruits / veggies during that day. 

D)      Activity

• Get off your butt : If you think you are "conserving" your energy by not moving, your are grossly mistaken. The more active you are, the more are the number of mitochondria (power houses) in each of your cells. Endurance activity leads to the biogenesis of these power-houses. It is a cumulative effect. The more you are active, the more you feel like being active. The opposite is also true. The lazier you are, the more you feel like lounging. (Sleeping too much leads to prolonged sleep inertia). So get hold of yourself. Snap out of this downward spiral. Move around, walk around, never sit for more than 10 min at a stretch. Be up and active the whole day. Walk when you talk on the phone. Grab opportunities to move around, both horizontally and vertically. 1 hour in the gym will not compensate for 23 hours of laziness. therefore, keep moving. That is what the human body is designed for. Keep yours skeleto-muscular system warm in all the waking hours. 
• Look after your house : dusting, cleaning, doing laundry (including starching and ironing), cooking, grocery-shopping and handling, sweeping, mopping, wall-tile-scrubbing, drain-de-clogging, pest-control, de-junking, de-cluttering, reorganizing cupboard/closet, etc. Grab opportunities to squat, e.g. mopping and gardening. 
• Go slightly out of the comfort zone. Walk a little faster. Sprint up the stairs. Pick up slightly heavier stuff than you think you can. Run a little longer/faster. Push the imaginary mental boundaries. The body will get used to the higher demands as you incrementally up your game. If you are comfortable, you are not making progress.
• Join the gym. Pencil it in your schedule as a priority. Leave everything and go there. Buy gym wear and gloves/gripper, shoes, soft socks, a small kit bag, towel, and water bottle. Educate yourself about pre-workout and post-workout meals, and follow through. 
• Split your weekly workout schedule into both anaerobic training and aerobic training. 
• Do cardio 3-4 times a week, with at least 2 sessions of 30 min of High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), as opposed to doing only LISS/MISS (Low/Medium-Intensity Steady-State cardio). Cardio burns fat, but HIIT shifts the metabolism to anaerobic glycogen-burning (from the liver), stretching your VO2 max (volume of oxygen) and lactate threshold (lactic acid suffocating the muscles). The heart, which is the non-stop muscle, grows stronger; and the lungs enhance their oxygen-exchange efficiency. Push your pulse to 80% of your Max. Heart Rate (MHR = 220-age). Redden your face and feel the sweat drench your brow, neck, and shoulders. 
• Weight train 2 times a week, for 45 min : one day upper body, another day lower body. This is anaerobic training; which (i) burns ATP during the workout, but (ii) burns fat for 36-48 hours after the session due to muscle hypertrophy. Lift heavy, for 5-8 reps, 15-20 sets, in max 60 min. Lifting light for many reps makes it an aerobic training! (Leave those 2 kg dumbbells for your pre-teenager!) If you don't get a mild DOMS (Delayed onset of muscular soreness) in the next 24-36 hours on the trained muscles, you did not train hard enough. 1RM = One rep max, is the move which requires your maximum strength to do it just once. Being able to do more than 15 reps in a set puts you in the aerobic (endurance) zone, i.e. the muscle does not go beyond its comfort zone to tear and repair, which could have enhanced your Basal Metabolic rate (BMR).
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• Please don't workout for all seven days a week. Keep it 5-6 times. Let your body repair itself. An onslaught of the stress-hormone cortisol will only cause your over-enthusiasm to back-fire.
• Naturally, men have more strength and women have more strength endurance, i.e., men do very heavy jobs, but just for a few times (e.g., moving furniture, lifting suitcases, carrying LPG cylinders, pushing the car, mowing the lawn). Women do jobs which are about 50%-60% as heavy, but for a much longer time (e.g., working in the kitchen, grocery-shopping, handling a baby, handling laundry). Older women and mothers develop stronger arms, core, and calves; as compared to teenage girls. So stop using the word 'aunty' for mothers in a derogatory way. "Aunty-looking" women are doing physically demanding work on a daily basis. Women also have more endurance to do moderate/light jobs for a very long time (e.g., cooking, housekeeping) due to their extra fat stores (They have ~20%-25% body fat as opposed to ~12%-15% in men), because fat is an unlimited source of energy. But the energy derived from fat stores won't help you in resisting crimes against women. Thrashing the criminal needs muscular strength (not muscular endurance), period. Therefore, in the gym, women need to focus on heavy weight training for strength. (Women cannot bulk up like men due to low testosterone, so relax and pump that iron). In increases their confidence and gives them a posture and a body language of sovereignty and self-esteem, which wards off anti-socials. On the other hand, men need to work on endurance (to do long-duration mundane tasks at home). Also, women need to work on their upper body strength (which is naturally only 50%-60% as much as in men), and men need to work on their lower body strength. 

E)      Sleep

• Violating the circadian rhythm is a disaster for a healthy body. Your hormones go for a toss, messing up your eating and activity patterns the next day.
• Sleep for at least 8 hours at night. When you feel sleepy, leave everything and go to bed. Never violate this. Listen to your body's signal(again). It is asking you to shut down for the day. Respect this. An active day (workout included), will help you enjoy a deep and uninterrupted sleep. A lazy day will delay you from falling asleep (unbalance of gati and sheetal). 
• Start lowering the lights by 8 pm. Get off the glare. Follow soon after by lowering the decibel levels. Stop talking after 9 pm : conversations (including online ones) excite the brain into activity, preventing you from relaxing into sleep. Too much of anything is bad.
• Too much sleep is equally bad. It slows the body into slothfulness, also called the sleep inertia. A good night's sleep must freshen you such that you are up and active again the next day with high energy. 
• Observe how you sleep. Are you having too many dreams? It means you are in the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which in NOT a deep sleep (the brain is awake, the body is paralyzed). Kya fayeda? You must be in the non-REM deep sleep zone for efficient repair and restoration of the body (including surge of growth hormone and lowering of cortisol). Sleep defragments and organizes all the information bombarded on the brain during the day, and sets it ready for the next day. The hypnogram below shows why we dream more often in the early morning hours, just before waking up. The aim should be to minimize REM sleep is to remove stress and detach from the world by 8 pm (i.e., no gadgets). 

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Once you lead a healthy and disciplined lifestyle, the body should be your servant. You tell it to run 5 km and it will run for you. You ask it to lift 100 kg and it will do that for you (I am talking to women, yes!). You ask it to wake and sleep at a particular time and it will adapt itself to suit your schedule. You ask your digestive system to extract all nutrition and recycle at a fixed time, and it will. You can even teach it when to feel hungry and when to give with the satiety signal. This wonder machine of the human body is at your service, you just need to understand its algorithm and respect it.