Life, Living and Lifestyle: Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

By Prabhash Karan

A life is what is given to us; a lifestyle is what is given by us. Research claims that maintaining only 5 good habits—eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, drinking only in moderation, not smoking and maintaining a healthy body weight—can not only keep the life vibrant through years but also extend a woman’s life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years, and a man’s by 12 years. The book, Life, Living and Lifestyle, illustrates these aspects of lifestyles with a special connection between human evolution and civilization! This book along with its four companion books—Nature Is My Teacher; Of Human Nature and Good Habits; How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life and Health and Medical Care—constitutes a series that tells the nature-human connection and its implication in our daily life, in the related set of separate episodes.

Life, Living and Lifestyle deals with lifestyle experiences of daily living. The book contains chapters: Active Lifestyle (As we grow, we travel through a series of institutional communities: first our family, then our school and university, then the workplace, then local and global institutions.); Play and Exercise (The guidelines of World Health Organization (WHO) on physical activity for an adult is very attainable: 75 minutes of vigorous exercise or 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week.); Joy of Yoga (“I lost weight,” “I quit smoking,” “It de-stressed me,” “I sleep better,” “It saved my marriage,” “It improved my child’s grades,” “I am now pregnant,” “It saved my family”—on and on and on goes the claims of yoga’s practitioners.); Lose Weight (By definition, in the centimeter-gram-second (CGS) system, the BMI number is a person’s weight in kilograms (kg) divided by square of height in meters (m). BMI=kg/m^2.); Walking and Running (An adult can walk 17,000 steps a day comfortably, which is roughly 7 to 8 miles.); Quit Smoking (The truth of smoking is disease, death, and horror—not glory, glamour, or pleasure.); Sleep (Sleep is by far the single critical factor, and definitely a calmest booster to improve the brain function.); Life, Living and Work Ethics (Simple life has its own reward.); Science and Technology (The tiny computer chips are embedded in all our gadgets, devices, and machines, from cell phone to brain cell, from microscope to telescope, and from subatomic level to space-level equipment.); Organize Yourself (For organizational skill, discipline is at the root.); Work and Workplace (In a global job war, according to a Gallup poll in 2011, out of 7 billion people worldwide, there were 5 billion people over fifteen years old, out of which 3 billion wanted full-time jobs, while there were available only 1.2 billion jobs.); Personal Finance and Money Habits (Poverty is not a shame, but being ashamed of it, is. Young minds are systematically victimized. When they grow up, they feel the guilt and shame of poverty.)

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781796017823

Prabhash Karan

Prabhash Karan is an engineer. He worked as a metallurgical engineer, civil engineer, structural engineer, and nuclear power plant engineer. Later, he worked as a software engineer writing computer codes in over two dozen programming languages. He was involved in developing IBM’s three operating systems. He speaks four languages and writes primarily in English and occasionally in his native language, Bengali. He writes very simple, targeted, and topic oriented, and makes the topic easy to get. He was born and raised in a loving family of eight in a remote village of coastal India. With no electricity and everybody in bare feet, he was raised in his multi-generational ancestral home—open air, earth and water, father and mother. He is a naturalist and a faithful follower of Mother Nature. He loves music and walking. Now over 70, he is a family man who still works fulltime, never been sick for a day in his life. He is an individual who is passionately optimistic about life. To him, life is so beautiful! He is the author of five books: Nature Is My Teacher; Of Human Nature and Good Habits; Life, Living and Lifestyle; How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life; and Health and Medical Care. His forthcoming book is In God We Trust.

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Copyright © 2019 by Prabhash Karan.

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Rev. date: 04/26/2019

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To my wife, Jhunu Karan, with love

Life, Living and Lifestyle

Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

Contents

1 ACTIVE LIFESTYLE

1.1 PLAY AND EXERCISE

1.2 JOY OF YOGA

1.3 LOSE WEIGHT

1.4 WALKING AND RUNNING

1.5 QUIT SMOKING

1.6 SLEEP

1.7 AGE GRACEFULLY

2 LIFE, LIVING AND WORK ETHICS

2.1 ETIQUETTE, COURTESY, AND BEHAVIOR

2.2 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

2.3 ORGANIZE YOURSELF

2.4 WORK AND WORKPLACE

2.5 THE JOB WE DO

2.6 HOME SWEET HOME

2.7 PERSONAL FINANCE AND MONEY HABITS

Nature Is My Teacher

Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

Contents

1 THE NATURE

1.1 MOTHER NATURE

1.2 THE UNIVERSE

1.3 PLANET EARTH

1.4 THE WEATHER

1.5 NATURAL RESOURCES

1.6 THE AIR WE BREATHE

1.7 THE WATER WE DRINK

1.8 THE FUTURE OF NATURE

2 ORIGIN OF LIFE

2.1 GIFT OF LIFE

2.2 HUMAN LIFE

2.3 HUMAN EVOLUTION

2.4 SELF AND THE REST OF THE WORLD

2.5 TIME GOES BY

2.6 LIFE CHANGES OVER TIME

3 HUMAN EMOTION AND LIFE EXPERIENCE

3.1 WORRIES, ANXIETIES, FEAR, AND REGRET

3.2 HOW TO DEAL WITH STRESS

3.3 DEPRESSION

3.4 KINDNESS AND DEVOTION

3.5 CHARITY AND HUMANITY

3.6 THE POWER OF HOPE

3.7 NO PAIN, NO GAIN

3.8 EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

Of Human Nature and Good Habits

Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

Contents

1 HUMAN NATURE

1.1 Nature vs. Nurture

1.2 Personality

1.3 Patience and Confidence

1.4 Discipline and Good Habits

1.5 Courage, Attitude, and Ambition

1.6 Aim in Life

2 MIND AND MENTAL HABITS

2.1 Mind and Body

2.2 Mind and Memory

2.3 Power of Meditation

2.4 Greed, Envy, and Jealousy

2.5 Humor and Laughter

2.6 Talk and Sing

3 NATURE AND NATURAL HABITS

3.1 Be Wise

3.2 Be Happy

3.3 Be Honest, Simple, and Natural

How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life

Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

Contents

1 LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS

1.1 Marriage

1.2 Family

1.3 Children

1.4 Friends and Society

2 ENJOY GOOD LIFE

2.1 Life Is Good

2.2 Life is Beautiful

2.3 Live Young, Live Long

3 ENJOY GOOD FOOD

3.1 How Food Works

3.2 Diet and Nutrition

3.3 Herbs and Spices

Health and Medical Care

Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature

Contents

1 ENJOY GOOD HEALTH

1.1 Men’s Health

1.2 Women’s Health

1.3 Children’s Health

2 MEDICAL CARE

2.1 Medical Science

2.2 Human Organs

2.3 Arthritis

2.4 Headache

2.5 Blood Pressure

2.6 Heart Attack and Stroke

2.7 Diabetics

2.8 Cancer

2.9 Old Age and Death

Preface

Nature! Mother Nature! She is so ancient yet so novel! So mysterious yet so marvelous! A deep connection between evolution and civilization! She is my life, she is my universe. From birth to death, Mother Nature cradles me in her bosom. She is always in my mind. She is so dear. Nature is my teacher.

Simplicity is her beauty! Nature that envelopes all of us is so dear, so loving! She provides us the grace, the beauty, and the fluency of our lives. The love, care, and affection of all our lives are imbibed from her spirit. She breathes life into us. Grow up in the sun, grow up in the shadow, we live the life given to us by her goodness. It is very hard to avoid her; and even harder, not to. She is the creator, protector, and promoter of our mortal life. Our purpose in life is worthy of her benevolence. She elevates us to that, that we are. We all are her children. Mother has been and will always remain synonymous with love, devotion, and dedication, and its personification as a nurturing mother is so primitive. Giving nature the attributes of a mother, life-giving and nurturing, is as old as the evolution of human being as a thinking animal. It was then, it is now, and it will always be. We are at home and in harmony with her—in our labor, at our leisure, and at our pleasure. She is the reservoir of all happiness. We follow her in baby steps, wherever she leads us to.

Modern research reveals that innate genetic programming accounts for as much as 50 percent of our happiness. Fifty percent! Our satisfaction with life is, to a large extent, already embedded in our genes by Mother Nature. Genetic researchers claim that the fact that genes help us to be happy is not an accident, rather it is a result of evolutional and natural selection. (Other combined factors—such as education, finance, marital happiness, and the status quo—accounts for less than 10 percent of happiness. The remaining 40 percent or so, is dependent on how we cope with the adverse situations in our life.) In Mother Nature, a whole planet of happiness waits for us at every step. Most of us enjoy it, the wise rejoice it. It is the human friction with nature, a Midas touch of Mother Nature! It is the eternal mother-child relation—so normal, yet so essential that the absence of either is an exception. Trust in nature is the prime expression of our life. In trusting nature, we trust ourselves. Life is beautiful. So cool! Mother Nature is so simple, yet so beautiful!

Nature Is My Teacher; Of Human Nature and Good Habits; Life, Living and Lifestyle; How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life and Health and Medical Care constitute a series—that tells the same tale in separate episodes. The names are different, the contents are different, yet the idea is one: to discover and rediscover the beauty of nature, and explore the wisdom of Mother Nature. All five books are subtitled, Baby Steps to Follow Mother Nature, signifying its obvious meaning, a hand-holding guide to life. Also, all books are introduced with the same preface—just to establish one origin reflecting a strong relationship among the books. Each book is a companion of and complement to the others. Nature Is My Teacher primarily deals with the physical, notional, and real world in general. Of Human Nature and Good Habits deals with the everyday experiences of the good life. Life, Living and Lifestyle deals with work, play, sleep, finance, and the practical experiences of good living. How to Win Nature and Enjoy Good Life deals with love, relationship, marriage and family life. Health and Medical Care deals with health and health care services, and primarily, how to prevent diseases, stay healthy and thrive. The book—five books combined—provides a comprehensive familiarity about our planet, our environment, our cosmos, our bodies, our minds, our health, our food, our illnesses, our medics, our life, our job, our living, and our lifestyles. The book deals with social physics, customs, myths, biases, and the biology of life. It gives a fascinating glimpse of some of the topics that we vaguely know or are told for the first time. The author pen-points these points in detail.

It’s not a story until it’s told! The topic is not only a fact, figure, and statistics, but also a story. The book tells us a complete story about how a slight alteration can make a significant renovation in life. The life of a modern man is moving at a frantic pace like never before. People now live in a society cultured with instant gratification: fast food, fast cash, miracle cure, extreme need, and I-want-want-it-all and I-want-it-now. They are rushing, all the time, not knowing to where. They are marinated so much with the culture of speed, that there’s hardly any pause for the cause, and there is no recess from the race. There is no time to think it through—the very purpose of life. People fail to comprehend how easy it is to cure all these maladies and still live a life of modernity. The book provides steps—in baby steps—with case studies to resolve the issues. The methods suggested in the book are very basic and very easy to follow. Each topic, each page, and even each paragraph relates an idea that you may have encountered in your daily life. Some ideas are trivial and straightforward. The only need is a slight adjustment to our stereotypical thinking and a little tuning of our lifestyle.

We are one-third born (nature), two-thirds made (nurture)! If you think about it seriously, this is a huge statement. We have to nurture while being inclusive of nature and vice-versa and transform our God-given talent for our benefit. A small adjustment in lifestyle (nurture) can make a huge difference and improve our quality of life meaningfully. The adjustments are so minor that we hardly experience any inconvenience. A tiny tip, a little mindfulness, and a little planning will lead to a lot happier life. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors essentially lived on day-to-day hunts and day-to-day harvesting of roots and vegetables. From that evolutionary standpoint, we humans are not really designed to think ahead about the distant future. Yet, in many ways, our health and happiness are essentially the sums of our today’s activities, including the countless choices we make about what we eat, what we do, what we plan for tomorrow and even how we spend our time now (i.e., moving versus sitting). Small moves—eating healthy, sleeping well, leading a simple life—can transform our lives profoundly. A big resolution adds up from many micro-resolutions. These micro-resolutions fit into our daily life, stay sustained over time, and lead us into good habits (e.g., do your duty, don’t tell lies, be natural, have self-assurance, choose whole-foods, eat less, be mindful of what you do, and don’t sweat over small stuff). Many good ideas and habits are explained in detail and are made easy to understand and to implement. Many are easy to accrue and adapt. Once accrued and adapted, they work like clockwork and help us to achieve a sea of changes. Good habits stay good for good; break it now, it is broken for good. The book makes a comparative study of both good things and bad things, in order to comprehend the problem with dos and don’ts, and make a good life even better, especially with the ever-helping hand from nature. Nothing triumphs over nature! Here are the statistics: if you consider all human physiological reactions so far discovered in the whole universe, which is approximately 1,000,000, the existing targeted reactions by all medicines and medical treatments are only 250, or percentage-wise only 0.025 percent. With only a 0.025 percent score, while the human boast of medical marvels (human genome, CRIPER, antibiotics, and vaccines), nature remains reserved, with 99.975 percent. You got the point. So, if you are wise, you better follow Mother Nature, for the better of you. Also, when you better your life, you also help others—your family members, friends, and colleagues—to better their lives as well. Thus, one of the ideas of the book is to influence as many people to better their lives as possible so that its impact on society, in the world, as a whole, is significant. Compared to its book value, the value of the book is unrivaled. The book is a tribute to our society and our humanity, at large.

Invent nature! Inventing nature is so exciting—precisely because of its enormous varieties and complexities! When we are in harmony with nature, we live naturally within the moral gravity. We maintain our self-dignity and our standing is at par with our conscious moral terms. Our labor becomes lighter, our leisure becomes a pleasure. For instance, a school of neurologists and neuroscientists, says that it is simply a mind-fulfilling just by staring at the sky. Keeping that in mind, what we have attempted in the book is to connect and build a bridge, between our existing lifestyle and our natural love of life. The connection helps us see the green of the trees, the blue of the sky, the birds fly, the rise of the sun, the gargle of the ocean, with a new look. The book transports you to nature, gives you a tour of wilderness, and inspires you to the many wonders of life. It makes you feel that these were there before your eyes all these days, yet, you missed them all. The joy of life lets you feel the traction of living. It is so close to the earth, yet so open to the world.

The views expressed in the book are solely of the author. The author is not an inventor or an originator, but a simple messenger who delivers the message. The book does not validate or endorse any scientific, medical, ethical, or religious view, advice, or recommendation. The book is for information only. Also, the information presented here does not claim textbook accuracy; rather, it is a general guide. The book gives a good faith summary of a good life. Some facts may be inadequate, inaccurate, deprecated, or outdated, therefore, any error, omission, and exclusion are on the part of the author, for which a plea is acknowledged in advance.

You cannot fight the facts. Facts are nothing but the interpretation of data, and they are not always linear. They are not a product of assumption, speculation, opinion, or notion. By expanding their explanatory power, the fascinating facts explained in the book reinforce the topic with research results, discoveries, surveys, and statistics. Today, there is so much information, so much communication, and so much evidence that one can no longer plead ignorance. Considering how vital these facts are, willful blindness is nothing but an incredible ignorance. Facts and statistics help us explain and compare the as-is with the as-should-be. Sometimes, statistics are as mystifying as they are enlightening. Thus, in order to keep the motion of the topic steady, the key data are skimmed and highlighted broadly to the context and then rounded up or down to make it generic, casual, simple, and, more importantly, easy to understand and remember. For instance, our sun is 93 million (92,960,000) miles away from Earth, and the Moon, one-quarter million (238,855) miles. Quantitatively, if any data are of any special importance, they are put in a numeric rather than text format. (Half is not exactly 1/2. The numeral 1/2 is more significant than half. Radiation from 1 chest CT scan = 350–400 standard chest X-rays or 1,400 dental X-rays or 70,000 backscatter airport scans or nineteen years of smoking of one pack of cigarettes per day. Text format: Greed is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism.) The percent and percent sign % are used interchangeably, % is used more for clarity. The data address the measure of the context and help us understand the topic in perspective. Some text of the topic is sub-texted for clear understanding like: The U.S. jails (jails are for short-term, minor crimes) and prisons (long-term, serious crimes) are primarily male-gender environment.

The book is an index and an introduction to many of our day-to-day concerns. By design, some vital information is repeated, sometimes immediately and, at other times, in different contexts, with the hope of meeting at some point, the person reading the book at random. Some sentences are repeated according to their importance. Some information goes beyond the scope of the chapter. Some technical terms, never heard of before, are translated into generic names. The book is targeted neither to professionals nor to experts but to ordinary people who need a how-to manual on everyday problems. Written by a reader like you, for a reader like you, the book may not teach you how to drive, but it will prompt you to safe driving. It may not prescribe you medicine, but it will prompt you to prevent illness in the first place and in the event of illness, to seek information and medication. The reader’s intelligence is never discounted, never ever. Far from it. Instead, it is appreciated.

Many of the ideas put in here are so basic that the reader has experienced them already: some familiar things you, the reader, will know from your gut feeling. For instance, it’s often convenient, and even a good idea to be irrational or simplify a decision, and then create a rule for your own use only that works for you most of the time. You can stick to it. One size never fits all. The social order at a national level, may not fit at an individual level, because every individual is unique and discrete. Many ideas are illustrated in the book from which you may pick and choose. Identifying your own thoughts with an additional endorsement from the book nevertheless reinforces your belief system and your own views, and thus fosters your self-assurance and helps you to improve your confidence and will make your bad day better. For a test-drive, crack open any book, at any chapter you like, and read any paragraph, now. Try it, test it, trust it. Overall, the initiative here is to make an idea work for you. Be optimistic, act realistic. If it works, hold on to it. If it’s worth sharing, share the idea and spread the knowledge. In fact, the broad readership of the book comes predominantly from word of mouth.

This book is indebted to hundreds of books, publications, journals, and articles. It is an enormous undertaking in trying to synthesize all the information delivered to the reader in a story-telling format, and at the same time, as accurate and as up-to-date. Again, make no mistake, the author is merely a messenger, not an inventor, originator, or any of that sort. Although filled with exciting ideas and fascinating facts, this book is not an academic work in the sense that everything here requires to be acknowledged or footnoted. It contains numerous comments, notes, and quotes. They are not attributed, and at times they are somewhat condensed; otherwise, they would interrupt the flow of the go. While the main topic is emphasized, some details are encapsulated, making it a more readable tale—a tale of arts, science, life, and nature. Readers are invited to join the debate and are respectfully requested to send their comments, complaints, and compliments. Readers, please note here that for the book’s next revision, any correction, suggestion, addition, deletion, or information, submitted to the author, will be highly treasured. The contents may become the property of the author, in which case it is assumed that the reader gives the author the right to use it suitably with or without compensation. All trademarks used in the book are the property of their respective owners and do not relate to any endorsement of any kind.

The book is topic oriented and detailed and covers everyday aspects of life. Out of more than a hundred standalone topics, readers are suggested to read only those that interest them now, not the entire book. Try any chapter, any page, or at least any paragraph—right now. At the end of the Preface, you get an overview. Each paragraph usually starts with a declarative sentence that announces the idea of the topic that follows. You then promptly feel the pull of the topic. While the book targets a wide audience giving readers a choice between numerous isolated, interrelated, and even unrelated topics, a typical reader is requested to read only a few topics. That’s worth having the book handy—to read a few pages now and then and refer back to it later. Even the author, who updates the topic periodically, finds some topic interestingly afresh.

This book is a quick and easy handbook, reference manual, good-will guide, how-to guide, you name it. It talks about the topics ranging from the creation of the universe to human evolution to modern-day civilization to current hypes to age-old myths and mysteries that mystify us. Why is the sky blue? Why do we typically submit to the situation, saying yes, or to go with the flow? Why do people often fail to recognize their own voice? How do one’s prayers affect others? Why do twins think and act alike? Why do half of all resolutions fail, and one-third of New Year’s resolutions do not make it to February (especially for weight loss)? Why don’t wearable fitness devices necessarily make you fitter? Or, you don’t need to use soap every day in your shower. Or, how to navigate through the shifting views, say, recommendation and confusion about aspirin, breast cancer, colorectal cancer, fat, eggs, vitamins, and dietary supplements. The book explains it all. The book is a myth buster, a zeal enhancer, and a life changer. Good health is always associated with good habits. Good habits are surprisingly few and basic; so, anyone can practice them without even trying. Knowing this helped the author when he tried for the first time. Written with uncomplicated clarity, various topics ring a bell. The book is a collection of explanations, propositions, and suggestions. The book possesses the power to change your good life better, for good. It will make you a new you!

Enjoy reading!

1 Active Lifestyle

I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community, and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can.

—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Irish literary critic, playwright, and essayist

A life is what is given to us; a lifestyle is what is given by us. Our lifestyle changes throughout the life cycle. As we grow, we travel through a series of institutional communities: first our family, then our school and university, then the workplace, then local and global institutions. These institutional communities are our societies at large with rules of their own. We humans are social beings by nature. In the natural course, we absorb these rules, and we become what we become. The relation is more of a covenant than a commandment. These institutional practices are passed down through generations and evolved over the ages. We live in our family, in our society, in our country, in our world.

In today’s lifestyle, the values of yesterday’s generations—study, work, save, invest, live within means—have been sub-primed. An individual, when he drifts out of society, is like a fish out of water. The love of soft living, the hunt for get-rich-quick schemes, do-first instead of safety-first have become the new norms. Everybody is rushing. There is barely any time to breathe and feel relaxed. Individualism gets prioritized; a man attempts to live alone. He may succeed but does not succeed as a human being. Sooner or later he understands the world is big, bigger than his world.

Which is the best country lifestyle-wise in the world today? If you were given a choice today, which country would you pick? (Hint: Bill Gates was born in the right country at the right time.) Newsweek made a survey across the globe and made lists of the best countries in the following categories:

• Education: (1) Finland, (2) South Korea, (3) Canada, (4) Singapore, (5) Japan, (6) Switzerland, (7) Estonia, (8) United Kingdom, (9) Ireland, and (10) Netherlands

• Health: (1) Japan, (2) Switzerland, (3) Sweden, (4) Spain, (5) Italy, (6) Australia, (7) Singapore, (8) Norway, (9) New Zealand, and (10) Netherlands

• Quality of Life (among Populous Nations): (1) Germany, (2) United States, (3) France, (4) Japan, (5) United Kingdom, (6) Italy, (7) Russia, (8) Mexico, (9) Thailand, and (10) Turkey

• Economic Competiveness: (1) Singapore, (2) United States, (3) South Korea, (4) United Kingdom, (5) Sweden, (6) Australia, (7) Switzerland, (8) Finland, (9) Luxemburg, and (10) Japan. The best political environment overall is in Sweden. But in low income, it is Ghana; in middle income, it is Poland; in medium size, it is Australia; and in large size, it is Germany.

• General: While there is no model for international success, the overall ranking is (1) Finland, (2) Switzerland, (3) Sweden, (4) Australia, (5) Luxemburg, (6) Norway, (7) Canada, (8) Netherlands, (9) Denmark, and (10) United States.

One report by HelpAge International and the University of Southampton, U.K., in 2014 looked at the social and economic well-being of older people in ninety-six countries. The study revealed that about one-third of all countries are inadequately equipped to deal with increasingly large aging populations. In middle-income to low-income countries, only a quarter of people over age sixty-five receive pensions. Countries on the low-end lack programs for free healthcare, community centers, chronic disease treatment, and subsidized transport. The global rankings of ninety-six countries are as follows: Norway (1), Sweden (2), Switzerland (3), Canada (4), Germany (5), Netherlands (6), Iceland (7), United States (8), Japan (9), New Zealand (10), United Kingdom (11), Denmark (12), Australia (13), Austria (14), Finland (15), France (16), Ireland (17), Israel (18), Luxembourg (19), Estonia (20), Spain (21), Chile (22), Uruguay (23), Panama (24), Czech Republic (25), Costa Rica (26), Belgium (27), Georgia (28), Slovenia (29), Mexico (30), Argentina (31), Poland (32), Ecuador (33), Cyprus (34), Latvia (35), Thailand (36), Portugal (37), Mauritius (38), Italy (39), Armenia (40), Romania (41), Peru (42), Sri Lanka (43), Philippines (44), Vietnam (45), Hungary (46), Slovakia (47), China (48), Kyrgyzstan (49), South Korea (50), Bolivia (51), Colombia (52), Albania (53), Nicaragua (54), Malta (55), Bulgaria (56), El Salvador (57), Brazil (58), Bangladesh (59), Lithuania (60), Tajikistan (61), Dominican Republic (62), Guatemala (63), Belarus (64), Russia (65), Paraguay (66), Croatia (67), Montenegro (68), India (69), Nepal (70), Indonesia (71), Mongolia (72), Greece (73), Moldova (74), Honduras (75), Venezuela (76), Turkey (77), Serbia (78), Cambodia (79), South Africa (80), Ghana (81), Ukraine (82), Morocco (83), Lao PDR (84), Nigeria (85), Rwanda (86), Iraq (87), Zambia (88), Uganda (89), Jordan (90), Pakistan (91), Tanzania (92), Malawi (93), West Bank and Gaza (94), Mozambique (95), and Afghanistan (96).

From fast food to the fast lane, from speed dating to speed yoga, from quick fixes to quick sex, we are marinated in the culture of fast. The critical lifestyle is taking its toll on the health and happiness of a typical citizen. Life is strained in a culture of spin and tabloid. People seek refuge in the cheap leisure that TV, cinema, and mass media outlets are dishing out to them. At the end of the day, it leaves them more exhausted than refreshed, leaves the mind feeling more vacuous than before. They try to seek pleasure in the gadgets that technologies are churning out, which tangle them into connectivity on a 24/7 basis. To portray a typical American life today, everything in life is somewhere else, and you have to get there fast by the car. While you get there fast by the car, you always fear an imaginary cop in the rear-view mirror. Technologies today are ramifying, like a climbing vine into almost everywhere of our life. Tomorrow it is even more vicious. Instead of moving closer to nature, people are moving away from nature. The result is not liberation but self-destruction. It’s a failure—a flat failure!

Stressed, rushed, and tired! This is the portrait of the modern family life. Today in the United States, in about half of all two-parent families, both parents work full time. The trend has sharply increased from previous decades. Working parents are stressed out, tense, and always in short of quality time with their families, their children, partners, and friends. They hardly have any time to pursue their own welfares or interests. This is not an individual problem or a personal issue; it is a social issue needing a societal-wide response, including government plans and policies like paid family leave, maternal and paternal leave, daycare, and after-school childcare. Families are forced to juggle on their own, and in most cases, this means women bear more burden in housekeeping and child rearing—particularly in managing children’s schedules and needs. Over half of all working parents say the work-family balancing act is extremely difficult. Parenting is stressful and tiring, and sometimes less enjoyable and delightful than it can be. In spite of a major shift in society, the workplace has not changed enough to alleviate these problems. Of all the full-time working parents, 40 percent of mothers and 50 percent of fathers, report spending too little time with their children, and about 60 percent of mothers and 50 percent of fathers, say they have hardly any leisure time. In such a family atmosphere, children are more likely than not to grow up just like their parents—stressed, rushed, and tired.

Slow down and remember this. Most things make no difference in life. When you run too fast or fly too high, you only lose traction with nature. You lose attraction to Mother Nature. For all those who feel more stressed, more exhausted, try a novel way. Slow down, take a rest, and forget the rest. Move closer to Mother Nature and feel the heat easily ebbing out. Mother Nature will console you. Forget the trendy entertainments, thinking there was already a surfeit of that in the ambience in which you lived, realizing the inanity of all that was being showered upon you by artificial ways. It is not free. What you get is often costly in some way or another, and you are paying for it most of the time, unwittingly. This is a tragedy for individuals and trouble for a world that people don’t mix, that ideas don’t get sparked, that friendships don’t flourish, stereotypes don’t get broken, and freedom doesn’t ring. It seems like life, yet it is not a life. The life is so fundamentally flawed. Things unreasonable are neither stable nor doable.

One meta-study tracking almost 79,000 women and 44,300 men for up to 34 years, during that time, more than 42,000 people died, find that maintaining only 5 good habits—eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, drinking only in moderation, not smoking and maintaining a healthy body weight—can not only keep the life vibrant through years but also extend a woman’s life expectancy at age 50 by 14 years, and a man’s by 12. Another study on various personality traits, including conscientiousness, extraversion, hostility and neuroticism followed a group of 4,765 people with an average age of 72, notice that personal relationship is at the key to a good life and living, and that while cheerfulness, outgoing and optimism keep the life thriving, worries, anxieties, stress, crankiness, and neuroticism leave the life depressing.

Believe the world that exists for you is the best of all possible worlds. Believe that life is absolutely worth living. Believe that life is not a battle but a game—a game to play and a play to win. Your belief will help create that fact. Have a purpose in life; be ready to die for that purpose. On the contrary, when you have no purpose to die for, you have no purpose to live for. Make your life purposeful. Don’t just buy a lifestyle blindly at the marketplace; instead, create one of your own. Never let yourself drift through life; be the author of your life. It is the most important work of art that you create.

Go natural! Have a breath of fresh air. Feel the joy of starting on a bright sunny day with smiling Mother Nature. This is the real value of life. No life can be better styled than a life styled by nature. A good life is always in accord with nature. Design your lifestyle inspired by Mother Nature. Life is good, make the lifestyle better.

1.1 Play and Exercise

The Greeks understood that mind and body must develop in harmonious proportions to produce a creative intelligence. And so did the most brilliant intelligence of our earliest days.

—Thomas Jefferson, when he said no less than two hours a day should be devoted to physical activities

The guidelines of World Health Organization (WHO) on physical activity for an adult is very attainable: 75 minutes of vigorous exercise or 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week. [Hint: The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, 2nd edition, released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, provides a comprehensive set of recommendations for Americans on the amounts and types of physical activities: Adults need at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity and should perform muscle-strengthening exercises on 2 or more days each week. Youth ages 6 to 17 years need at least 60 minutes of physical activity per day, including aerobic, muscle-strengthening, and bone-strengthening activities.] In order to find the sweet spot for recommended exercise time per week, one meta-study was carried out by the National Cancer Institute who compiled data from six large, ongoing health surveys, covering more than 661,000 adults, most of whom were middle-aged. In the mix, they covered people who exercised nothing at all, to people who exercised 10 times as much the current recommendation. After comparing 14 years’ worth of death records, results published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2018, researchers establish that: (a) people who did not exercise at all are at the highest risk of early death; (b) people who met the recommended level of exercise (150 minutes per week) had longer longevity and are 31 percent less likely to die prematurely compared to those who never exercised; and (c) people who tripled the recommended level of exercise (450 minutes per week or a little more than an hour per day) hit the sweet spot for exercise benefits that had even longer longevity and 39 percent less likely to die prematurely compared to those who never exercised. WHO conducted one meta-study based on data from 358 surveys during 2001 to 2016, covering 1.9 million people from 168 countries. The result, published in The Lancet Global Health, reveals that 27.5% of people worldwide do not meet the guideline. Women get less exercise than men. In the United States, more than one-quarter of adults are completely sedentary (practically no physical activity), and about two-thirds are inadequately active—engaged in less than 30 minutes of physical activity a day.

In order to maintain a high quality of health, you must recognize that physical activity is vital to health. This is reaffirmed by individual experience and by numerous studies. In 2015, scientists noted that just after 10 minutes of exercise, more than 1,000 molecular changes occur in the muscles—let alone the rest of the body. There exists a strong correlation between physical activity, health, improved quality of life, and longevity. People who are more physically active throughout most of their adult years, experience fewer symptoms of depression than those who are less active. In the United States, the estimated number of deaths due to a sedentary lifestyle, inactivity and obesity, is over half a million a year. The Stanford University research in 2014 stated that while American diets have remained pretty much same for the last twenty years and the average caloric intake remained about same (consuming about 500 calories per day more than they did in 1970), lack of exercise is now a primary risk factor for morbidity/mortality. One study covering over 334,000 men and women found that a 20-minute daily walk (or an equivalent exercise where a mere 100 calories are burned) can reduce the risk of premature death by 16 to 30 percent, and that the lack of physical activity otherwise contributes to at least twice as many deaths when tied to the number of deaths linked only to obesity.

Doctors, scientists, and researchers—even ancient scholars and philosophers—have long claimed that exercise works like a miracle drug, the most valuable pharmaceutical ever developed. Now they have some prima facie evidences including the followings:

1. Exercise is the most effective, potent way to improve quality of life. It helps you age slowly and lengthen lifespan by as much as five years.

2. Exercise can be used as medicine for the handicapped, pregnant and sick—even the sickest patient. It can help the patient recover from major illness. Exercise is very good for older people.

3. Exercise triggers many changes throughout the body during and after exercise. Within minutes of starting exercise, the body’s circulating levels of white blood cells, natural killer cells, and other disease-fighting agents increase. These immune-system warriors look for and fight any invading virus, bacteria, and bugs. The more active you are, the more active they are. A few other amazing things happen in just a few minutes of exercise: the results are identical improvements in blood-sugar control and heart function, measurably better when one exercises five times longer than the shorter. Taking a walk or going for a run improves even your eye health, brain health, and skin health—your skin will look bright and beautiful. An exercise quickens blood flow to the skin, delivering nutrients and oxygen that improves skin health or heals any wound faster.

4. Exercise cancels out the negative effects of being overweight/obese when it comes to heart disease. Researchers gathered data from 5,344 middle-aged and older people about their height and weight (to calculate BMI), along with their reported exercise habits, and finally tallied them with their heart disease and stroke over fifteen years. Overall, people who had higher BMI had the higher rates of heart disease, but when researchers looked closely at overweight and obese people who did exercise regularly, they found that their rates of heart disease were comparable to those of normal-weight people who also exercised regularly.

5. Researchers at the National Institute on Aging have identified the production of a muscle protein (cathepsin B) that can cause the growth of new cells and new connections in the hippocampus, which is the area of the brain that is responsible for memory. This explains the link between a sharp body and a sharp mind. Exercise boosts the release of chemical compounds in the brain—dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins—that in turn boost mood and relieve stress. Exercise, to the point of breaking sweat, is a drug-free way to enhance mood and alleviate symptoms like ADHD and depression. It helps stabilize mood swings, increase the speed of learning, memorize better, and prevent (or delay) the onset of Alzheimer’s disease. A growing body of research is showing that the brain benefits of exercise go far beyond disease prevention: exercise can diminish the impact of brain changes on cognition, not just prevent it. Especially one kind in particular—aerobic exercise—appears to be the king. It gets the heart beating faster, increases the blood flow to the brain. People who exercise grow larger volumes in areas of brain associated with reasoning and executive functions. Another study shows that people who exercise regularly have different sets of proteins moving through their bloodstreams than those who are usually sedentary: about 800 proteins out of about 1,100 known proteins, take part in health-related processes, such as muscle-repair mechanism, slowing inflammation and other immune-system responses.

6. Four hours after a memory task, exercise increases the brain patterns associated with memory and helps to retain the information better than in people who exercise immediately afterwards or people who do not exercise at all, according to one study published in the journal Current Biology in 2016.

7. The fat cells shrink. Our body uses both carbohydrate and fat as energy sources. After consistent aerobic exercise over time, the body gets efficient at burning the fat, which requires a lot of oxygen to convert it into energy. As the cardiovascular system gets stronger and better at delivering oxygen, it helps to metabolize more fat as an energy source. Exercise helps to make fat tissue healthier, which is also a good thing. With fat biopsies analysis, scientists find less inflammation and molecular working in the fat tissue in ways that improve metabolic health over time. This fat is an active and necessary tissue, generating and sending multiple biochemical signals that affect biological operations throughout the body.

8. Exercise helps to turn the white fat into brown fat, according to research on cell metabolism. At the cellular level, irisin—a hormone naturally found in muscle cells but produced more in the body when we do exercise—transforms human white fat to brown fat, and also suppresses the formation of new white fat. Besides weight loss, it promotes the formation of bone as well.

9. Exercise builds bone. Bone is living tissue. It responds to the rigors we put our bodies through; it reacts and adapts to strain—like load-bearing strength activity—by changing its shape, curvature, thickness, and density. Measuring bone density by hitting bones with X-rays, scientists have shown its structure at a microscopic scale: (a) even a tiny amount of exercise affects part of the bone’s architecture, known as the trabecula, the little branches inside bone that link to each other; and (b) a weight-bearing exercise grows outer layers of the bone (cortical shell), making them slightly thicker.

10. To stay young, you have to keep the cells young. Research has found that just moderate-intensity physical activity helps to keep the cells young. By analyzing the muscle biopsies from cyclists’ legs before and after a cycling session, researchers measured the blood levels of muscle function with lactase, which the muscle cells produce when exercised, and noticed the production of a compound called nuclear respiratory factor 1 (NRF1), which controls the shortening of the telomeres. Exercise boosts the levels of NRF1, which in turn protects the telomeres from being shortened. Each session of moderate exercise adds a layer of protection to the telomeres being refreshed, thus helping the DNA and, in turn, the cells, to remain younger.

11. On the contrary, for a negative proof, when you stop exercising (a) within 10 days, you will experience a reduction in blood flow (shown using MRI brain scans) to the hippocampus, which is associated with memory and emotion; (b) within 2 weeks, endurance plummets, VO2 max drops about 10 percent; (c) within 4 weeks, strength slackens, VO2 max drops about 15 percent; and (d) within 8 weeks, the fat starts accumulating.

12. Exercise alters how people control their impulses. Studies have shown that regular exercise alters the region of the brain involved in higher-level of thinking and decision-making, which in turn plays an important role in impulse control. And in the real world too, after several observational studies, research proves that it really does.

13. Sitting long hours can age you as much as eight years. A long-term study of chronic diseases in about 1,500 postmenopausal women, using blood samples focused on the telomeres, found that women who did not get a daily half hour of exercise, or those who were sedentary (sitting about 10 hours or more), had shorter telomeres than those who spent less time sitting every day. The shortening of telomeres can be added up to eight years of aging.

14. Being unfit is almost as bad as smoking, when considering the lifespan. In 1963, the University of Gothenburg in Sweden recruited 1,000 healthy fifty-year-old men and studied them for the rest of their lives to determine the impact of fitness on lifespan. The scientists grouped them in three categories with low, medium, and high aerobic capacity at age fifty-four and then followed them for almost fifty years, with testing about once each decade. Finally, it compared the risk of early deaths with a variety of health parameters based on each man’s VO2 max, cholesterol profile, blood pressure, and history of smoking. The findings, published in 2016 in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, reveal that men with low aerobic capacity had the low VO2 max and had a 21 percent higher risk of dying prematurely than those in the medium aerobic group. In addition, there was a nearly 42 percent higher risk when compared with those of the high aerobic group.

15. One large study, called Cooper Center Longitudinal Study, tracking 18,000 people, an average age of 50, for nearly 40 years reveal that people with higher fitness in middle age (people who exercised more and/or more intensely) have a : (a) 16% lower risk of depression compared to people with lower fitness; (b) 61% lower risk of dying from heart disease, and, (c) among people who were diagnosed with depression, 56% lower risk of dying from heart-related problems compared to people with lower fitness. Another study that tracked over 2,200 middle-aged men for up to 44 years, reveals that being physically able and active and having good muscle strength in their middle age, yields a longer lifespan.

16. According to one study, published in the Journal of Applied Physiology in 2018, older men and women who have exercised for decades, have the muscles which are indistinguishable in many ways (say, by counting capillaries and enzymes) from those of healthy 25-year-olds, making them biologically about 30 years younger than their chronological ages of sedentary elderly. While researchers are not sanguine whether the exercise habits directly caused the difference in health or if and how genes, income, diet and other lifestyle factors contributed, but the general notion is decades of exercise is the basis.

17. Regular exercise is one best way to boost your immune system. If you look at all the good lifestyle factors (eat better, sleep well, don’t smoke, drink modestly) that decrease your suffering from any illness (common cold, asthma, headache), being physically active is the best option. For instance, a 30 to 60 minute of moderate intensity aerobic exercise—brisk walking, cycling or easy running—increases the circulation of natural killer cells, white blood cells and other immune cells, which is good enough for your body to encounter the illness-causing pathogen. But, after about three hours of exercise, as these immune cells retreat back to the tissues they came from, the immune-boosting effect of exercise is short-lived. This is why a regular exercise is so crucial.

It’s not just you. Most of us are turned off by the thought of exercise; because, it is intense, bothersome and time-consuming. But the fact remains that people learn to enjoy these activities and be happy being active by simply tweaking those beliefs and expectations: because, the exercise goes hand-in-hand with practically any other aspect of our life, promoting social connectivity, relaxing leisure time, and a feeling of accomplishment. That shift in mindset has to happen—we should be turned on by the thought of exercise; because, it’s a powerful, effective and time-sensitive activity. We must at least recognize that any physical activity is better than no physical activity. Move your body for an hour a day, at least! Love and enjoy exercise, walk and perform domestic physical activities that you love. Isometric exercise is a natural therapy that is free for our mind and our body. According to a recent study published in the BMJ, there’s a strong association between physical activities and the risk of five chronic diseases: breast cancer, bowel cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke. Physical activities include all forms of movement, exercise, housework, gardening, and active transportations (such as walking, jogging, hiking, running, and cycling). The World Health Organization (WHO) introduced the concept of metabolic equivalent of task (MET). MET is a physiological measure of energy consumption of task (physical activity). Theoretically, it is defined as the ratio of metabolic rate (the rate of energy consumption) during a specific physical activity to a reference (unit) metabolic rate. MET ratings are as follows: sleeping (0.9), sitting (1), desk work (1.5), walking 2.5 mph (2.9), stationary bicycling (3.0), walking 3.0 mph (3.3), bicycling (4.0), jogging (7.0), and running (8.0). A half hour of running, therefore, is equal to 240 MET minutes. The WHO recommends a minimum of 600 MET minutes a week across different domains of daily life. However, significant risk reduction occurs at a much higher level—around 3,000 to 4,000 MET minutes a week, which WHO emphasizes is possible if an individual is mindful to incorporate different types of activities into his or her daily routine. In other words, move your body actively as much as you can, at least an hour or two each day.

Wearable fitness devices are one digital way to keep track of your activities, but don’t bank on them. They don’t necessarily make you fitter. One trial was carried out by the University of Pittsburgh between 2010 and 2012, involving 470 adults between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five who were put on a low-calorie diet. Following counselling sessions, all participants were advised to increase their physical activity. Some were given wearable tech devices that monitored their activity, connected online for feedback. All of them were followed for eighteen more months, and at the end of the two years, researchers noticed that on average, those without the wearables lost 13 pounds, while those with wearables lost only 7.7 pounds. Another team of researchers from Stanford University Medical Center and Stanford Hospital and Clinics studied 7 of the most popular devices available in the market in 2017 and compared their accuracy to the gold-standard tests that doctor’s use. Their findings: fitness trackers are good at measuring heart rates (5 percent margin) but not so good at measuring calories. They made similar findings with previous studies that participants who wore fitness trackers actually lost less weight than participants who didn’t wear the trackers. Possible reasons: (a) wearables pacify our ability to feel the feelings, the anecdotes and the body’s inputs that our brain interprets on real time to proper control and function of body dynamics; (b) when we rely on technology for everything instead of listening to our body, we do not get the best benefit from the workout; (c) wearables can hurt by the data it produces, if we focus only on one aspect of the training, forgetting all other aspects; and (d) an intense focus on data from wearables can disconnect us from the experience of the workout. In other words, sometimes no information is good information—and it’s certainly better than wrong information.

One study by the Mayo Clinic tracked 38,480 men and women for up to sixteen years. Researchers divided them into groups based on their estimated fitness. The results, published in 2016, reveal that people who were the least fit had a 50 percent higher risk of dying of heart disease over the course of study, compared to those who were most fit. Even two important variables—high blood pressure and cholesterol—when factored in to estimate the risk of early death, did not sway the statistics in a meaningful way, compared to fitness alone.

But the trouble is that as much as 80 percent of Americans do not get the recommended 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week, and over 80 million children over age six are entirely inactive. People, wise or otherwise, are notoriously poor in assessing the long-term benefit and risk of their lifestyle choices. The seemingly vague promises that exercise