Total Body Fitness

Confusing? Please read that again and do some serious thinking. It will become clear, especially if you have read the section on “Mind”.

Growing in India as an obese kid, I constantly pampered myself with food rich in fat and sugar. Whenever my dad found time, he coerced me do some exercise. I did ten pushups to please him, and that was my limit.

In the college hostel, the main course for lunch, as well as dinner, was beef. Raised in a totally vegetarian family, it was a shock for me at first. But soon I started loving it and I became a total Non vegetarian!

While in India, I ate beef or chicken with my main meals most of the days! As for exercise, except for the occasional parties, where dancing the Viennese Waltz to Johann Strauss’s music was my favorite act, I hardly exercised. There was no concept of total body fitness! 

Probably due to my good genes, I survived without any major health issues - except for the chronic blood pressure I developed by the time I was fifty.

Life in America was an opportunity for change. For the first few years money was tight. We ate the cheapest things found in grocery stores, which was rice, lentils, potatoes, green beans, squash, and ah…the cabbage at 10 cents a pound! And we froze a 10 lb bag of chicken leg quarters for $3 that lasted for ever…!

Looking back, that was healthy food! Except the chicken, as I figure now.

For exercise, I walked…and walked…and walked. You see, we didn’t have a car for almost six months! And indeed we walked the beautiful parks and gardens, and the clean sidewalks. The air was always clean and fresh!! Soon I got back into great shape!!

There you go! I just told you the two most important things you need to do in order to attain total body fitness…

Eat Healthy, and Exercise like Crazy!

You have heard all this a hundred times. There are thousands of books, and videos, and classes, on this topic. It is needless to spend time or money sifting through all those circuitous information. Just follow the essence in these two lines instead!

• Eat a healthy vegetarian diet, consisting of whole grain products, beans, Lentils, and plenty of fruits and vegetables, some of them green, cooked with the bare minimum fat and salt.
• Exercise your body for minimum one hour every day, which can be walking briskly three to four miles, or any other aerobic activity you chose.

But how do you get the motivation and the discipline to follow this advise? Enter Robin Sharma, one of my master minds!

In the section on Mind Control Techniques, I wrote about his celebrated book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari. This was the book that literally pushed me into taking charge of my life and actually start practicing all the good stuff I was learning.

OK. So you have to do just two things for total body fitness…

Eat Healthy

Here is what he says about “Eating Healthy”. I am just going to quote from his book, and let you take it up from there. These quotes are from Chapter Nine, The Ancient Art of Self-Leadership which will kick start you into action!

“Basically, live foods are those that are created through the natural interaction of the sun, air, soil and water. What I’m talking about here is a vegetarian diet. Fill your plate with fresh vegetables, fruits and grains and you might just live forever.”

Now remember, I had turned vegetarian much before reading this book. So for me, reading this book was just a reconfirmation of this great way to live healthy. Here is another -

“This is the diet that nature intended. It is alive, vital and supremely healthy…… And as to your concern about strength, the most powerful animals on the planet, ranging from gorillas to elephants, wear the badge of proud vegetarians. Did you know that a gorilla has about thirty times the strength of a man?”

For those who are “staunch” non vegetarians, it may be difficult to become vegetarians overnight. So, “If you don’t want to become a strict vegetarian, at least start having a salad with every meal and fruit for dessert. Even this will make a huge difference in the quality of your physical life.”

Well, there is a lot more to say about how a vegetarian diet promotes total body fitness. So in the next section, I will cover details of some of my success stories and medical miracles I produced with vegetarian diet.

I will also throw light on another great book that helped me chose my Best Life Diet for achieving total body fitness and age defying life. But let me not digress, and finish with this chapter first.

Exercise like Crazy  

I knew of the value of exercise, and I was already working out every day. But the value of waking up early in the morning as explained in “The Monk” was a powerful reminder, as well a motivation, to start early in the morning with a good dose of exercise. 

In this book, you will read about the magical qualities of the early morning in several places. Like, “There are few things more natural than rising with the glory of the first rays of a new day.”

In fact, this is also what my parents had tried to teach me during my childhood. I did wake up at 5 AM occasionally, but never paid much attention to it to make it a regular habit.

As I kept reading “The Monk”, one day I reached a point of such inspiration and ecstasy, that I just decided to give up my old habit, set my alarm clock for 4 AM the next day. That one discipline changed my life forever!

Since 4 AM was a bit too early to step outside my home, I started with my sets of stationary workouts from my living room, and then went down to the small exercise room we have in our condominium and walked 2 miles on the treadmill.

Later, as the first rays of the sun showed up on the horizon, I would go out and walk another mile or two imbibing the freshness of nature.

That’s all there is to it! Eat a healthy, mostly vegetarian food, and Exercise every single day, as much as you possibly can. That is all you need to do to attain total body fitness for life.

But I cannot end this chapter without a brief mention of how I combined my living room workouts with another profound ritual, that helped me move beyond present moment awareness and consciousness, into the daily experience of living in oneness with the universe.

I am dedicating a separate page to this ritual and the blissful experience, which is the ultimate goal of this web site. That is also the essence of enlightenment!

To develop your best life diet for a long and disease free life, click here

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