Feel Good, Look Great: Yoga

By Ishwar Chander

Looking great begins with feeling good on the inside. Feeling good and looking great is not only possible, but is a real you, waiting to be discovered. I am sure you have tried many diet ideas and exercise recommendations, only to find that they are hard to keep up and confusing. This book offers you an opportunity to change your life style with the knowledge that will allow you to leverage and tailor your life style to fit your unique situation. As you begin to get fit, you lose weight, look better and feel happier. This journey of self transformation begins with an overall game plan that starts off with knowing yourself, and your environment. One way to make your journey to fitness effective and efficient is to leverage the current knowledge on body subsystem regeneration, effect and relationship with foods, and findings of exercise science from today’s athletes. This culminates into discovering and creating the most powerful of all medicines that we know of today, that is, the terrific combination of regular exercise, healthy food, and stress management. Regular yoga practice and simple meditation techniques, presented here, may help you see the results of improvement in not only your physical flexibility and strength, but also in your brain function. It will lower your stress levels and bring peace and serenity into your life. Researchers have found that a mere 8 weeks of practice may increase your brain size and change the brain structure itself. As we live longer, it is imperative that we find and do everything that will enhance the quality of our lives, well into the later years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ishwar Chander
• Release date: Sep 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301301393

Ishwar Chander

Dr. Ishwar Chander has been a researcher, applied technologist, and process expert for many years. He has dedicated this effort to stitch together the current scientific findings in diet, exercise, body awareness, and yoga practices; and developed a solution approach that would allow anyone to achieve the level of fitness that is commensurate with his or her age bracket. Fitness is not a goal! It is a wonderful journey that everyone can and must undertake.

Book preview

Preface

The second day of a diet is always easier than the first. By the second day you’re off it.

Jackie Gleason

re you interested in weight loss, or just want to get fit or feel healthy? If your answer is yes to either, then I am sure this is not the first book that you are about to read. I believe, my journey to seek this goal, is really not unlike yours. Just like you, I read many books on diet and exercise, exercised, searched and tried various methods to improve my physical fitness. I must admit that I had a very limited success, if at all. I would sometimes lose 5 to 8 pounds and gain them right back. I tried some of the calorie counting programs that you can get on your computer, Ipad, or smart phone. It made me feel like an unhappy accountant. To compensate for accidentally exceeding my calorie consumption, I would deny eating certain things that I pined to eat. I felt prisoner of calorie counting, experienced a sense of deprivation and guilt. Many times after trying the much advice offered by many books, videos and TV programs, I felt despondent, gave up and went back to my old ways of limited self care.

I strongly felt that there ought to be a way to fix the eating process, such that, it feels more natural, invisibly attention seeking, and allows self-paced transition to healthy life-style.  I would really like if I do not have to calorie count, remember what to eat when, and knew exercises (time and amount) that are easy to keep up. This journey took me through educating myself in the various disciples of body science, food science and exercise science. What I discovered fascinated me. The more out of shape you are (irrespective of your age), the easier it is, to get fitness improvements faster, if you only knew how to make your body respond. We usually assign intelligence to our brain, yet it has been discovered that our body, which is sum total of its components has its own intelligence. Each body subsystem has neurons (brain material) embedded within them. It is the communication amongst the various body subsystems that allows our body to perform its best; and to continually adapt and heal, as we interact with the world. 

This is not entirely a yoga book, but I use the word yoga to join the knowledge of the various aspects of science (which is the product of many wonderful minds) to help us achieve physical wellbeing, and mental calmness and clarity. After all, we all want to feel good, and feeling good (with healthy mind and body) is going to make us look positively happy or even look great!

Introduction

A Journey of thousand miles begins with a single step

Laozi

he above saying attributed to philosopher Laozi, is from around 600BC. It is believed that Laozi might have implied ‘action’, as the key ingredient. Source of all action is a thought, deliberate or not. Yet, without action, manifestation of any tangible change is unlikely.

We all intuitively feel that if we exercise enough, and eat right, we wouldn’t have to worry about being and feeling healthy. If this is so simple, then why aren’t we able to do it? In spite of the many challenges that our world faces today, we live in exciting times. Our collective body of knowledge (and means of sharing it) in the areas of food and exercise science is impressive. In fact, numerous experts are continually telling, warning, prescribing or proscribing us about foods, exercises, and supplements, among others. May-be there is so much of such information around us, that we are overwhelmed and confused. This leads to ambivalence and inaction, because it is hard to figure out actionable steps. And unless we are able to act with a step in the right direction, we are probably not going to get to the place we would like to be at. While the first active step is a great beginning, it is the set of sustained actions that are going to make the change happen.

The focus of my investigation and suggestions is about: how to avoid low fitness, replace fat with muscle as much as possible, feel more energetic, increase flexibility and strength, and age gracefully. In this book, I have tried to integrate the various scientific facts in a simple way, and have provided easy to follow suggestions to build healthy eating habits and exercise alternatives. In a way, I offer you a change in life style that is easy to follow and self paced, which can be easily tailored, without too many experts telling you what to do and what not to do. Even though I explore the body, food and exercise sciences, I have stayed away from complicated scientific terms and have kept these ideas very simple. No one has to have any prior knowledge of any terms that I have used, in order to benefit from the simple understanding of how to leverage the goodness of our scientific knowledge to become fit faster. I strongly believe that when you eat right and keep doing adequate physical activity (by whatever means), you will feel good. You will have positive outlook, feel uplifted and pleased with yourself, and feel beautiful!

In chapter Fitness Game Plan, I lay out the overall plan to embark on this wonderful journey towards better health. This plan offers an approach to starting this journey, so that we are in control, enjoy the journey, improve our participation, keep ourselves engaged, and reward our success. Once you are fit and healthy, it provides easy tips to stay in that zone. Wouldn’t it be nice to know your current state, so that, as you move forward, you are able to see that your efforts are fruitful? I certainly feel so, because this would help provide enough motivation to continue, create permanent change to your life style, and allow you to experience the joy of success.

In chapter Knowing Your Health Number, I discuss what is it to be healthy. I provide easy methods for estimating important stats about yourself, so that you are able to have an objective measure of body’s fitness. As we identify the health benefits, it is important to note that flexibility, stamina and improved body composition (proportion of muscle to fat) are important components of quality of life.

In chapter Understanding Your Landscape, I discuss identifying and understanding our environment, such as, heredity, current activity levels, and food relationships. Hereditary factors could indicate the kinds of health issues that you may want to be extra careful of, and pursue aggressive preventative measures to ward off existing (familial) preconditions that you might be vulnerable to. Your diet and type of exercise may need to be tailored to accommodate them.

In chapter Body Science, I discuss our body’s wonderful ability to regenerate, and discuss how we can consciously help it enhance and maintain this ability.

In chapter Food Science, I discuss how the various foods that we see in restaurants, and advertised on television, are put together to entice our senses (pleasing our sense organs or reward system) creating a drug like dependency. I provide guidance on identifying food components, so that, you are able to not let your body’s natural defenses be overtaken by well designed food packages and marketing campaigns. This knowledge is especially helpful if you are trying to educate and safeguard your children, against aggressive food campaigns and commercials.

In chapter Exercise Science, I discuss how to prolong our body’s regenerative abilities, by knowing how to prepare for effective physical activity and apply lessons learned from athletes.

In chapter Wonder Drug: Wholesome Food and Exercise, I discuss how exercise and good food combination is the best solution to avoid many ailments, and enhance the quality of our lives. I propose that journey to fitness is a continuum, i.e., it is not a goal, but a way to live. You may begin the set of activities proposed for weight loss, and then find your balance that matches your food intake to your activity levels. Achieving such a living balance will free you from the yo-yo phenomena of overeating, followed by over exercising. Behavior of overeating and over exercising creates stress on our organs, which builds up toxicity and inflammation in our cells and abets rapid aging.

In chapter Yoga Experience, I discuss how to perform important yoga poses for fitness, strength, balance, and relaxation. I provide simple methods to experience energy flow through your body, and feel serenity that comes from mind-body connection.

1.      Fitness Game Plan

Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.

Henry David Thoreau

irst of all, I would like to state that getting healthier, should beget us the ideal weight that we can comfortably carry. We would like to balance our input (food intake) to the level of activities that we would be engaged in (output), while maintaining enough reserve energy. We would like to carry ourselves comfortably, and feel good inside and outside. So, before starting on your journey for better health, let’s layout an overall game plan to move us forward, as