JOIN USDid you know that mental distress could make your system pile up fat around your waist? In the past one year, if you’ve suddenly started padding up on that region, find out what’s bothering you. It could be that somebody less deserving than you got that promotion or admission into a prestigious college. Could be somebody promised something and let you down. Whether the issue is big or small, those extra inches around your waist are saying, “Make peace, make peace.”
While you’re factoring that in, get busy with some instant measures:
* Cut out all fries and sweets—they are friends of the flab on your middle.
* Eat simple, hot foods like plain dal and rice. These are real comfort foods. They warm heart and stomach.
* Walk/run/cycle 45 minutes daily to keep the fat burning and your spirits climbing.
* Get a terra band from a sports equipment shop and do the stretches –just three to five reps each initially— as shown in the booklet. Aside: You’re doing the exercises right when you actually feel your stomach and waist being sucked in as you stretch.
* Replace white rice with brown rice. White rice contributes to flab; brown rice—due to its high fibre content—doesn’t.
* Eat healthy vegetables—white gourd, fenugreek/spinach/cabbage leaves, tinda, French beans, sweet potatoes. Aside: Avoid raw cabbage. Roast it with chat masala on a non-stick pan.
* Drink water, buttermilk. Brew tea with cinnamon.
* Get at least eight hours of sleep. It is wonderfully fortifying and calms both mind and body.
Within three days, you’ll find the puffed-up look…poof! gone and your waistline tighter. Meanwhile, erase that distress. This is important because your body deserves a peaceful environment as much as your mind does. Otherwise, the risks of high blood pressure, heart problems, diabetes increase.
Recognize in a mature way what you can control and deal with and what you cannot. You can always choose not to eat a jalebi, but you can’t always choose not to attend office where you’ve been overlooked for a promotion. While you may need to vent your feelings for a day or two, you can’t afford to allow that grouse to linger and embitter you. You need to move on, higher.
Not with an angry defiant “I’ll-show-them” attitude, but an assertively sensible “There’s a better way for me.” For, the only way is up.
Masters say sadness carves hollows of hunger in our psyche so that we may fill more joy in them. And that a feeling of injustice done to us burns holes in our ego to humble and allow heaven’s healing light to pour in.
Ah yes, sometimes we need to lose a lot to know we haven’t lost anything except our false pride.
The message is: become simple. Shed the superfluous. Avoid meeting negative people and being negative. Say no to ego-massaging putting-down-others thoughts.
Andre Comte-Sponville says with inspiring accuracy: “The simple person lives the way he breathes, with no effort or glory, no affectation…Simplicity is freedom, buoyancy, transparency. As simple, as free as the air…” This simple person has realized this over time—life is a funny thing.
“Half of it is a joke; half a dream. And I don’t know, yet, which half is which. To be safe and sure, I laugh anyway. When you laugh, you put something special in the world—your music.”