One of my personal mottos is, “There is no such thing as too much butter.” I have never met a cookie I didn’t like. And although I truly think of myself as a church-going, exercising kind of woman, I have only seen the inside of a church or a gym a handful of times in the past year.

But the last few years have been emotionally and physically very hard on me. I got divorced after three decades of marriage, my son became mentally ill after a series of head injuries in college, an autoimmune disease wreaked havoc on my body, much  of my hair fell out, and my belly has now reached Buddha-like proportions.

Clearly, a change is in order. It’s just a coincidence this  change is happening near the beginning of the year, because it is long overdue. I am past the stage where I want to lie in bed with the covers over my head, but the events of the past five years have battered my spirit. It’s not really true that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes it just kills you in a less obvious way.

So I have decided to remake my life by diving into Ayurvedic habits big-time this year. I am opening up the capsules from YouVeda’s My Healthy Mood packet and throwing them into my green smoothie each morning,  taking all the suggestions on the YouVeda app, and beginning to follow several of the 10 healthy Ayurvedic habits in Cate Stillman’s excellent book, “Body Thrive.” It’s quite a big step for me.

I have never done yoga, except that one Hot Yoga class a friend forced me into where I couldn’t decide whether I needed to pass out or throw up. It was the class where my friend kept apologizing to the instructor. “It’s her first time,” she said about 10,000 times.

But on Day One,  I started the morning imagining that I was stepping into a bathtub with blue water, while breathing in and out.  I learned Lion’s Pose, scaring the dog with my enthusiastic roars. I drank 6 glasses of water before my breakfast smoothie, and effortlessly drank about 120 ounces by day’s end.  I got up at 5 and went to bed at 9:30. I started the day running up the stairs and doing jumping jacks for 20 minutes, so it felt easy to stay active and eat right the entire day. I was in such a good mood I could see my entire life furling out before me: I would drop 15 pounds just in time to wear a bikini to Mexico in February, cure my autoimmune disease, get my son back on his feet, and never say a harsh word to anyone again.

That is, until I could not get the Wet Wipes open so that I could quickly grab one and wipe the  healthy green smoothie off my mouth before my morning job.  I could just not tell where the God-forsaken packet opening was. After all my industrious activity I was late, so a string of obscenities came hurtling out of my mouth. I doomed the Wet Wipes to hell.

Clearly, the new protocol takes longer than one day to work.

But I am excited about my new Ayurvedic habits. They already feel intrinsically right to me.  Here are the nuggets from Body Thrive  I found most helpful:

• Eat your last meal of the day by 6 or 7 p.m., at least three hours before bed. The earlier and lighter the better. Make it something full of water, like soup and salad. Your body digests heavy meals best at midday– it’s a furnace between 10 and 2– and you are taxing your system too much to give it heavy food after the sun goes down. Ayurveda is all about following the rhythms of the day, and historically Homo Sapiens always ate during the day when they could see, so it makes sense. Brush and floss your teeth after that last meal, and you will be less tempted to snack. Isn’t that a simple, but great tip?

• Try to go to bed with lights out by 10 p.m. at the latest. Get up and go to bed with the sun, and you will age better. I don’t know about you, but Vanity always wins out over health with me. Say something will make me healthier, and it doesn’t motivate me as much as it should.  Say it will help my wrinkles and shrink my belly, and I am all over it.

• Upon waking, take two minutes in bed to think quietly about what you want to get out of your day. Once up, start drinking cups of warm or room temperature water. Start with one and try to work your way up to a quart. In my enthusiasm, I drank 6 cups of lemon water the first morning and have never had a better start to my day, and surprisingly it was effortless. The whole idea is to hydrate and flush out your system first thing in the morning, and it feels so right. Plus, I am convinced water fluffs up your face and makes it less wrinkly. Before this, I would go the entire day and realize I had not consumed one entire glass of water. But now that I am starting the day right, I actually feel like sipping water all day, and it doesn’t feel like a chore at all. Water is life. Since then, I started adding a little cayenne pepper, apple cider vinegar, and turmeric to at least one cup of my warm lemon water a time or two during the day.

• Before breakfast, move your body for 20 minutes.I run up and down the steps and do jumping jacks, then take a short walk and follow it with a few yoga exercises on the YouVeda app. You could start with any movement you enjoy—dancing, stretching, yoga. During this time, breathe deeply. You are trying to get your blood flow going, gorge on oxygen, and clear stagnation out of the body. Do deep, coordinated breathing—anything from a brisk, deep-breathing walk to Sun Salutations. If you don’t get in any other exercise during the day, you won’t feel like such a sloth, but it actually got me in the mood to do more later.

• Power up your nutrition. Consciously think about eating a variety of vegetables and fruits– more than you ever have before.Nature gives us everything we need to heal ourselves in all those vegetables, so it’s essential to eat a variety so we can be nourished by a buffet of vitamins and antioxidants. Try eating only 3 meals a day without snacking, and only when you are hungry. Drink only water between meals to empower your digestion to work undisturbed. If you constantly crave sweets, try eating bitter vegetables like kale, spinach or chard to cut the craving. I am Sugar’s bitch, so this tip is saving me from desperately looking for the Nestle’s semi-sweet baking chips in my pantry in the afternoon, or pawing through the garbage for the chocolate I just threw out. I’ve been sauteing fresh spinach with oil or ghee and a little crushed garlic, and kale or beet greens are staples in my morning smoothie.  And the simple little diet tips in the YouVeda app, like prepping healthy meals in advance so I don’t resort to eating junk when I’m hungry,  are really helping me eat better already.  It’s amazing what justifications you can come up with when you’re hungry: “I deserve this, M&M’s aren’t really THAT bad for you, and if you had my life, you’d eat donuts, too.”  A little prep time makes a big difference.

• Sit in Silence. Start with one or two minutes and work your way up. Set an alarm during the day and just stop, drop and sit. I like the words Stillman uses: meditation is our secret weapon, our savior, our salve. The meditation exercises on the YouVeda app are creative and addictive. When you start feeling stressed out, do a meditation. Today I meditated on the color indigo, imagining it spreading through all the veins in my body, and then letting it dissolve into white light. Maybe these little moments of new-found peace will keep me from hurting  someone in rush hour traffic one evening.  Indigo, indigo, indigo.

This afternoon the fifth-grade boy I take care of after school took one look at me and immediately commented, “You look more fit today.” This is the child who yells at me for eating his cookies and delights in informing me that I look old. When I protest that assessment, his little sister gangs up on me and sassily asks, “Do you ever look in the mirror?”

When he unexpectedly gave me the positive feedback  today, I answered a bit defensively, “What, are you implying I usually look fat?”

“No,” he said, his gaze pointedly hovering on my mid-section, “But you honestly look three pounds lighter today.”

After a week of my new protocol, I am getting compliments from a  rude fifth-grader who  never misses a thing.  And maybe because of the My Healthy Mood packet,  I honestly feel better equipped to handle the mouthiness.

Man, this Ayurvedic stuff rocks.

Author:

Diana Woodin
YouVeda Wellness Contributor