The Basic Principles of Ayurveda
Ayurveda is a holistic health care system that is approximately five thousand years old. Originally, it was passed on by oral tradition, and its earliest documentation is found in the ancient philosophical texts known as the Vedas, a profound component of Indian culture and history, and a cornerstone of Hinduism. Ayurveda has been practiced in hospitals throughout India for thousands of years, treating millions of patients. However, in the Western world, ayurveda is still considered to be a complementary or alternative medicine, despite its long-documented history and daily practice in India. The World Health Organization (WHO) has recognized ayurveda as a safe traditional medicine based on an extensive body of scientific evidence.
Ayurveda’s main objective is restoring balance within you. It is that simple, and the simplicity of this aim will be constantly reinforced throughout this book, because all components of ayurvedic medicine align to achieve this goal.
Ayurveda emphasizes the wholeness of each of us. It defines wellness as a state in which all bodily tissues, organs, systems, and functions are acting together interdependently to maintain the delicate balance between body, mind, and consciousness (spirit) so as to promote good health, in spite of many negative influences around us.
MAIN FACTORS OF IMBALANCE
When your gut is in a state of imbalance, its ability to manufacture and synthetize, as well as assimilate and absorb various nutrients, regulate blood sugar, and store fat becomes impaired. These imbalanced conditions occur most often due to overeating in parallel with low expenditure of energy. They become the cause for accumulation of lipids, in particular at the level of adipose tissue and liver. A deterioration in these basic functions can lead to putting on extra weight, or becoming overweight or obese. By maintaining balanced gut health, we can prevent or more easily manage such conditions.
In Western scientific terms, obesity is described as a multifactorial disease involving a complex network of physical, systemic, physiological, and mental factors. Your body accommodates excess calories—which normally come from carbohydrates, fats, or proteins—as forms of fat that may impair the maintenance of good heath, because this fat cannot be burned off through the usual channels. Many Western diets are high in calories, frequently from fast food and high-calorie beverages. People with body imbalances might need to eat more calories, or what we call "empty calories," before feeling full, or may eat more than is necessary due to stress or anxiety. The ayurvedic approach of personalized or tailored nutrition recognizes our individuality and is rooted in the concept that one size does not fit all. I am sure this perception resonates within you.
ENCOURAGEMENT
To encourage you to read further, let me set out some key challenges and explain how I approach the subject at hand.
If weight loss and rebalancing were easy, you wouldn’t be reading this book. Given that you have started to read this book, you will be learning about your gut and how and when to communicate with it.
Weight loss, for most people, is not just a simple equation of eating less or exercising more. This book will support you by investigating the ayurvedic understanding of how your gut functions based on your individual body constitution (your prakruti) and its potential and limitations and will provide you with the most relevant tools and personalized activities to address weight and gut health issues naturally, economically, and effectively. In these pages you’ll find recognition of yourself as you are right now, and if required, you’ll be aided in your transition away from a "vicious circle" to a "virtuous circle."
The words obese or obesity have clear medical meanings, but they often appear with adjectives, such as "morbidly obese." However, the categories of "obese" and "overweight" in fact exist in various grades; one is not simply obese or morbidly obese—these distinctions are more nuanced than merely one or the other. As such, I will refer to grades of obesity where possible or helpful. One fundamental pillar of ayurveda is the respect for all creatures.
Awareness of your body imbalance and what it means for those who are trying to manage extra weight, or who are overweight or obese, is critical to making change. We will explore this in both ayurvedic and modern scientific terms, address specific gut health and weight issues, and present effective ways you can tackle weight and general gut health in your daily life, with minimal disruption to your regular activities.
Let me share that recently, I wrote a book called Ayurveda for Depression, and through the process of writing on this other pandemic condition, I was reminded of the many interconnections between these subjects. For that reason, here, I will sometimes refer you to the contents of my previous book to provide you some complementary information that may be helpful.
A SOCIETAL APPROACH
Modern biomedical research seeks to provide answers as to how we can effectively address these physical, and mental, imbalances. However, these approaches tend to be more "macro" in their application—a one-size-fits-all prescription—irrespective of the reasons for a particular individual’s being overweight or suffering from obesity. This can result in standard "Guidelines" that cover virtually everyone but may not be ideal for many people.
Ayurveda differs fundamentally in its approach: you are a person requiring solutions tailored for you and your condition; you are not treated as a tiny replication within a larger pool of patients.
Also, let me note here that words matter: The modern language used in addressing pandemic or epidemic challenges is often the language of warfare—"the war on drugs," "the war on terror," "the war against cancer," "the battle against obesity," and more recently, "the war against Covid." It is the language of fighting, conflict, and confrontation. It is not the language of solutions. Perhaps it is time to stop "killing" and instead start noticing and learning to live based on the observation of our biological processes that lead us to these types of personal imbalances and participate actively from a nonviolent place within ourselves.
What we don’t hear—and what I want to address more specifically in this book on obesity, under the light of ayurveda—is a more discerning language of change: "the answer to obesity" instead of "the war against obesity"; or "the connection to our gut" instead of "the war against calories." Connecting and sharing "the answer" is a step toward resolution of the challenge at hand. Nobody is at war with anybody here. This phrasing reshapes our expectations, showing us that we will not be fighting and killing but instead facing and solving the issues.
We will also address and describe extra weight, being overweight, and obesity conditions as metabolic imbalances in order to differentiate them from the relatively new term metabolic syndrome, a cluster of biochemical and physiological abnormalities such as high blood sugar, high blood pressure, anomalous cholesterol levels, and surplus body fat around the waist—all of which are associated with the development of cardiovascular disease, including heart attack and stroke, as well as type 2 diabetes. Most of the ailments related to metabolic syndrome have no symptoms, and they respond well to exercise, weight loss, proper diet, and other lifestyle changes like quitting smoking, which can eventually be supported by prescribed medication.
YOUR TREE
Like us, trees also come in all shapes and sizes, and they have the potential to grow healthier and thrive when planted on favorable and protective grounds. Looking at nature, we see that trees are nurtured through the elements of light, earth, air, heat, and space, and require a balance of these factors to grow. A mango tree will produce mangos, and their taste will be sweet, while a lemon tree will grow lemons with a sour or bitter taste. Even if they were planted in the same soil and received identical nourishment, their inner natures will result in fruits with specific characteristics. Of course, to create their fruits, these trees require special care such as the right soil and water, and the eradication of weeds. So, consider, if you were a tree, what type of tree would you be?
We have been and remain engaged in a process that is doing continuous damage to nature, which we lack the light or clarity to discern, and which as a result directly affects what is so beautifully described in ayurveda as prakruti—our individual constitution. Our human situation cannot be compared to trees well-nourished by exceptional soil conditions that allow them to grow, spread, and create worthy output. Independently of our prakruti, either by ignorance, misuse, or abuse, we allow the growth of many weeds around us in our daily lives, often in the form of habits. Additionally, we do not necessarily know the kinds of fruits that life has invited us to yield, and as a result, in the process of daily life, these weeds can proliferate, consume space, and use up our essential substrates, making us weaker and more imbalanced. Without taking care, we can end up being identified with the weeds we nurture within and around us.