Good Health is my first priority for 2021 and beyond.
I will start with physical health. Over the last several years, I understood that certain aspects of health were not under my control. 2021 made me realize that fully. So, I just told myself that “ to become and staying happy”, I just need to set aside the things that were not under my control. After this became a lifestyle mantra, other things started to follow easily.
My plan for good physical health started with good eating, sleeping and physical activity.
Good diet was not much of a problem, given that I could eat or should not eat was governed by my doctor. Therefore the focus turned on to eating on time or rather not eating at untimely hours. Starting November, I slowly started to get this into some bit of control. I started following some of the things that I was told earlier by either my Pranic healer or by a nutritionist. My Pranic healer used to say that its very bad to drink coffee or tea first thing in the morning, as both these (especially coffee) are highly acidic. He advised me to drink a glass of warm or chilled milk first thing in the morning and drink my coffee after 45-60 minutes. I started this on a daily basis. Also, due to realignment of my medications, was forced to have breakfast around 8 am. While I have not seen much of a benefit in the short time, I think this will definitely lead to an improvement over a period of time.
The next focus was on physical activity. I used to run a fair bit before May (including during lockdown, when I used to run inside my house or my apartment complex), but then a 2-month flare up of my ulcerative colitis put a stop to this. So had to restart my running. After about month being locked up due to my corona illness, when i first started to run, I could not do my usual distance or pace. I attributed this to a combination of my lack of activities for over 3 months and post COVID issues. Therefore, I started walking again. At the same time, I started some of the yoga stretches I used to do a few years ago to improve my flexibility as well as strengthen my lower back. This became a routine for about 4-5 weeks. Then out of the blue, Netflix said you can watch stuff for free for a weekend. I downloaded so much stuff that I am still watching for 3 weeks, that my walking / yoga sessions have almost literally stopped. The last 2 weeks made me realize that getting into discipline is very hard. You cannot have distractions. So, starting the whole routine again this week. The plan now is to start regular morning and evening walks, morning yoga and may be weekend cycling. Let’s see how this goes. I will update this routine again at the end of January.
The third leg of my 3-legged stool called good physical health is good sleep. A lot of us, including myself in my earlier days give the least importance to sleep - both the duration and the quality. While I used to get my quota of sleep, I always felt that I could do better on the quality of sleep. My doctor kept telling me for last 5 years to sleep early and wake up early. We all learnt in this in primary school - “Early bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”. Somehow, our later education made us “wise enough” to both forget this proverb and discard it as unnecessary. Add to this our technology advancement. A couple of decades ago, not many in India new about baseball, basketball or American football. In the last twenty years, with friends and relatives in the US, and technology bringing these sports to our living rooms (and to our handheld devices, in the recent past months), our sleep patterns has been disturbed by “live sports”. I used to watch sports, movies etc sometimes beyond midnight. To correct this, I told myself that I will get to bed early. But because I was used to sleeping late, just by getting to bed early did not make me sleep early. I turned the way around - I started getting up by 5 am. After a few days, my body became tired and I had to sleep by 9:30 pm. This became a routine, and for last 4 weeks or so, i am sticking to a 9:30 pm bed time and 5 am wake up alarm. While I have not felt any benefits of this now, this helped me in my next step to happiness - good mental health. More on that tomorrow.
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