An Excerpt from The Wheel of Healing with Ayurveda by Michelle S. Fondin
You need not go far to get advice on how you should live your life or improve your health. We are bombarded today, more than ever, with the latest and greatest trend. From pomegranate seeds and goji berries to chia seeds, every week it’s something different, an additional thing that may take a place on our already crammed lists. If it’s not the latest food or supplement, it’s the next powerful drug claiming to make us younger and happier or to give us a better sex life. All this advice, whether good or bad, always does one specific thing: it draws us outside ourselves to seek wellness; and in the end, this makes us crazy. Because, to be honest, who do you listen to? Really, who can you trust when the advice is changing so rapidly? At the time of this writing, many of my clients are turning to daytime talk shows for advice on diet, exercise, and balancing their lives. Frankly, I have nothing against talk shows, and I’m sure that guests on the shows have plenty of knowledge. But again, much of the advice doesn’t empower the spectators to take charge of their own health by tuning in to what’s going on inside. And since much of the information is piecemeal, it doesn’t necessarily give them the tools to follow a complete program to get and stay healthy.
Ayurvedic medicine teaches people to first look inward. Get to know yourself inside and out. Know what makes you tick. And what makes you tick is probably different from what makes the other people in your life tick. If you do not take this crucial step first, no sprout, herb, vitamin, juice, or drug will help you.
Back in the 1980s, the rising trend was to see fat in the diet as a bad thing. Everything had to be fat-free or you could not lose weight, according to the claims. As a result, the food companies began producing fat-free everything — even fat-free butter, which is naturally 100 percent fat. I was eighteen years old at the height of this trend and, like many teenage girls, wanted to lose a few pounds. So I began a fat-free diet. I made sure not to add any fat whatsoever to my diet.
Then a couple of things happened. First, I began to lose my appetite. Food literally made me sick. I could not stomach fat-free cheese, yogurt, or dressings. I found them too sweet and sickening. Second, I began to experience headaches and a slump in energy, and my mood was terrible. I did manage to lose some weight, but at the cost of my well-being. Finally, after a few months, as happens with any diet that excludes a major food group, my body retaliated. I gave up, pigged out on all the fat my body had been craving, and regained the weight. Years later, when I discovered Ayurvedic medicine, I learned why my body had responded so poorly to the fat-free diet. First of all, our bodies need fat to survive. This is especially true of the human brain, which is 60 percent fat, making it the fattiest organ in the body. Moreover, my Ayurvedic mind-body type is composed of generous amounts of space and air. The absence of fat only increases these elements in the body-mind, and for me this led to disaster.
What often happens is that our body gives us signals of discomfort when we do something that is not nourishing us. Then our mind overrides those signals with reasons why this thing is, in fact, good for us. Even when in reality it’s not. At those moments we are overriding our body’s natural intelligence.
Taking Responsibility for Your Health
One concept you must embrace before beginning this journey is the concept of taking responsibility for your own health and well-being. Fully knowing that you are the one directly influencing your health is the key to turning your health around for the better.
The shift that you will make is from a victim mind-set to a responsibility-based mind-set. One is reactive, and the other is proactive. If you are to heal completely and live more fully, it’s essential that you let go of the victim mind-set. That mind-set says, “I can’t get healthy because…” or “I’m unhealthy because…my husband [or my wife, my job, my mother, and so on] stresses me out.” When we have that mind-set, we get angry when the people around us don’t respond favorably when we are ill. My question to you is: How can you expect others to care more about your health than you do?
Taking responsibility for your health doesn’t mean blaming yourself. It simply means taking charge. Don’t wait for your spouse to cook you healthy meals; instead, go shopping, use the principles in this book, and make dinner yourself. If you don’t know how to cook, take a cooking class. And don’t put off exercise by waiting for that next paycheck to come so you can join a gym. Put on a pair of sneakers and comfortable clothing now, get outside, and walk for twenty or thirty minutes. There will always be excuses that let you avoid improving your health, more excuses than you can probably conjure up in your mind right now. But there is an equal number of opportunities to grasp each and every day. When you make this shift, you can be a beacon of light for others to follow.
Focus on why you desire health. Let that desire be your guide and motivation. And then go for it. You are the one who cares the most about you.
Michelle S. Fondin is the author of The Wheel of Healing with Ayurveda. She holds a Vedic Master Certificate from the Chopra Center and is a member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association and Yoga Alliance. She treats clients at her Ayurvedic Path center, speaks and offers workshops, and lives in Herndon, Virginia. Visit her online at michellefondin.com.
Excerpted from the book The Wheel of Healing with Ayruveda ©2015 by Michelle S. Fondin. Printed with permission of New World Library. www.newworldlibrary.com