Wednesday, April 02, 2014

How to be healthy in a country like India.

The health of the nation is determined based on the health of its people. One could put down a simple rule that by eating healthy food, and by performing regular exercises and avoiding stress altogether we can have a healthy lifestyle. For my country India, the above is desirable though not always feasible.

My country has diverse traditions and cultures and for those who dwell in cities, to have a mix of this multi-cultural setup is quite common. Let me begin with our food practices. Long gone are the days where we restricted our food habits to our exact region or community. Today we would have breakfast based on a cuisine  belonging to one part of the country, lunch from another and dinner could be still not even from our country but made with some influence of western or inter continental cuisine.

Most of our urban young population live and work in the big towns. This mostly involves a 9 to 5 job five or six days a week. Besides work we have enough social and family obligations to keep us busy over the weekend. Amidst all these, the idea of regular exercise don't fit into many of their daily routines. Due to industrial workplace and residential area bifurcation, most of us will have to commute long distances to reach our offices. Add to that the pollution caused by the vehicles during the journey. The high competitive market  means there is lot of pressure involved in getting our work done. All of these add up the stress one has to take day in day out to make the ends meet.

Hence for a country which has chaos built into its DNA the only way to stay healthy is to follow simple rules in life. I will describe them based on the categories food, exercise, stress.

Food: Now we will have to agree that in order to get the flavour in our food we tend to ignore the health quotient of the ingredients that we take while preparing it. My recommendation is as follows.
Always include green salads as part of your diet. It could be for your lunch or dinner. If the food we eat contains lot of proteins, then they tend to generate heat in the body. Cucumber and raw tomatoes are known as good agents to cool down our body after heavy intake of meat etc. Make sure we drink as much water as possible throughout the day to help the metabolism of our body. Another trick I picked up from attending wedding feasts is that, after having a heavy meal if we are to drink a glass of hot water or tea, it helps in dissolving lot of the fat that may have accumulated in our food pipe.

Another important tip I received from one of my college professor was that, however complex the food material is, if we chew them properly and allow it to disintegrate we are again aiding the digestive process to be completed quickly. As Indians, we do a common mistake by keeping our mouths open when eating mostly because we would be talking in between our eating. This allows air to get into our stomach and further delay the food from being digested.

Exercise: Do not add exercise as a task to your routine, instead build your routine around exercise. Let me explain what I meant here. If we are unable to dedicate regular time for workouts, make sure we do our daily activities in such a manner that we get all the exercises needed in a timely and natural order.

For example, make it a point that you will never depend on a lift again. Now if your office is located in 20th floor make sure you take the stairs for at least 4 to 5 floors daily. If you have to communicate some thing to a colleague ditch that phone or IM or email, make it a practice to head over to his or desk and talk about the matter in hand and then comeback and send an email for future reference of the discussion. Make sure you do not stock up a water bottle. Yes, every time you are thirsty head over to the pantry and have one glass at a time. And remember our food habits mean that we need to have lots and lots of water.

Take a cycle to the nearest store you want to visit. You will be cheating your mind into thinking you are doing your daily chore but in reality you are doing all you can in little amounts to ensure your body receives that adequate amount of exercise daily.

Stress: Now there is no easy solution for this problem. The modern lifestyle has been designed in such a way that we can never really avoid stress. We can still find our secrets to de stress if you we start noting down things that make us really happy. Is it spending time with our dear ones? Is it by watching our favorite movie show? Is it done by playing with our pets? Or is it done by engaging in any indoor or outdoor activities like games and sports etc.

From our ancient times we have been hearing about the saints and sages practising meditation to achieve moksha. Perhaps they had foreseen a country where its people would be leading a highly stress full life in future. Which is why by their teachings, learning yoga and practicing it has immense effect on our lives in current conditions.


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