The Hindu Business Line : Pause before you pop fitness first

It is a cause for concern that few people work on improving their immune system. Why bother when medicines abound over the counter? Don’t do this to yourself. Instead, aspire to be strong, fit and healthy. Nurture that beautiful inner urge to attain a higher state of knowing, well-being, freedom, power, joy.

Keep faith in the processes of exercise, diet, meditation by doing them sincerely, regularly. Regularity powerfully shifts the mind-body-spirit rhythms toward a higher healing frequency. You lose some power when you become irregular.

Exercise with heart. You are not just moving your limbs mechanically, you are pulsing strength and beauty signals into your heart’s functioning. The body ceases to clamour and moves into a tranquil dynamism, evolving from surviving to thriving.

How much should you exercise? For maintenance, walk 16 km per week; for weight-loss or cholesterol reduction, walk 24 km per week. To rhythmise the mind with the body, listen to music or spiritual discourses as you walk. Music contacts your emotional nature and taps your self-giving resources. Discourses clear, purify and magnetise your mind where your every act and interaction brings sweet fruits.

Further power your physical processes with some key immunity-strengthening foods. Find a balance between enjoying the sense that it’s good for you and the sense of taste. By giving in only to your sense of taste, you proceed towards lethargy or nervousness and finally illness.

Train yourself to observe how you feel with certain foods. For example:

If you are slow and easy-going, you may find carbs such as potatoes, rice, wheat, fried foods sedate you and make you lethargic. Leafy greens, raw salads, vegetables, apples, pears, moong sprouts, black pepper pull you out of your regressive retreat and propel you to progressive dynamism.

If you are hyperactive and restless, acidic, ‘heaty’ tomatoes, garlic, pepper, papaya, honey, corn stoke your hot-headedness. Greens, mushrooms, melons, apples, rice, wheat, moong sprouts cool and calm your system.

If you are spaced out, dreamy and indecisive, yeasted bread, idlis and dosas that contain urad dal, sugar, rajma, channa may make you more ‘airy’ and bloated. Heavy foods such as bananas, rice, oats anchor you; so do carrots, onions, green beans, melons, dals.

Whatever your temperament, ensure that you have these on your plate:

Carrots, greens, tomatoes, guavas, oranges — these rich antioxidants which defuse illness-causing agents and enrich your immune cells.

Yoghurt makes your digestive system secrete the enzyme immunoglobulin that strengthens your ability to repel disease. Yoghurt also cools inflammation.

Mushrooms, apple juice and tea contain the antioxidant theanine that purifies your lymphocytes.

Garlic, turmeric, fennel seeds (saunf) are excellent to stave off infections.

Lady fingers are supreme detoxifiers. A clean stomach is a healthy stomach.

Listen to your gut and say “No” boldly to any food that causes discomfort (acidity, headache, gas, muscle aches, etc). Since one year, my wife has been navigating the no-acidity, no-headache food highway successfully (she avoids chocolates, cheese, peanuts) and feels really upbeat about not having to swallow painkillers. When you experience freedom from pain, the taste of old favourites automatically loosens its hold over your mind.

The immune system can also strengthen through subtle forces called prana in Ayurveda. A strong will to remain well and this intensity expressed through thoughts, mantras or prayers can channel pranic energies to an afflicted spot or course healingly through the entire body. Of course, any medication that you may be having must be continued. Meditation is not an alternative therapy, it is a supplementary therapy.

One visualisation meditation technique that leaves you in a wonderfully peaceful state of wellness is:

Sit comfortably in a chair, neck supported. Close your eyes. Relax every part of your body. Visualise a healing light entering your body through your toes and moving up to your head. Hold this vision for a few seconds. Place your index finger mid-eyebrows to help you keep your attention on that pranic spot. Silently repeat, “Om shanti, I am a peaceful soul” until you feel stillness steal into your head and being. Be in this meditative state as long as you effortlessly can without “I have to get back to work” thoughts intruding on you. Open your eyes with a smile and carry this sense of peace into all that you do.

So far, meditation is the only known way to tap into the secret invisible harmony that sustains life. It is neither magical nor miraculous, just a method as are exercise and diet. As you get into this health-fostering lifestyle, never feel deprived, disconsolate or ‘old’. Today, to be stress-free, illness-free is an achievement. Besides, is being stuck in an unhealthy lifestyle privy to daily discomforts and complaints ‘youthful’? A strong immune system is ageless. Like gold.

The writer is co-author of the book ‘Fitness for Life’

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