Healing with Nature

Yoga is a very popular form of exercise. It is becoming more and more popular these days. There are many kinds of Yoga, bikram, ashtanga, jivamukti, anusara, etc. Do these exercises really do more than other exercises? In a word, no, Yoga poses or exercises are just another form of exercise to condition the body.

There is nothing wrong with Yoga, but Yoga doesn’t convey any supernatural powers to us either. Running, lifting weight, push-ups, sit-ups, other strength building exercises are as helpful to our physical abilities as any of the forms of Yoga. Yoga is useful to build strength in certain parts of the body but most of the advantages of Yoga can be found in many other forms of exercise.

I am not telling you to stop doing Yoga, but that paying hundreds of dollars for a Yoga class because the instructor is a grand Yoga instructor and doing Yoga will change your life is a huge exaggeration. If you just learn some strength building and stretching exercises on your own and do them without any equipment for free, you will be just as good off as a person who spends thousands of dollars for a private Yoga instructor. Just make sure that you are getting enough exercise, a good rule of thumb is about 30 to 60 minutes of a moderate to high level of exercise every day.

The kind of exercise can vary by day or it can be the same, but just make sure that you stick with some form of exercise. Don’t be fooled by the marketing tactics of the Yoga gurus and other special exercise routines that cost a lot to learn. You can get in the best of physical health without paying a cent for special classes or equipment.

If you asked someone who is totally mainstream and knows nothing about health what is a healthy diet, many will say that a vegetarian diet is a healthy diet. I suppose compared to the standard American or western diet that causes as much as 98 percent of the population to have some sort of cardio-vascular disease (as proven by the autopsies done to killed soldiers in the Vietnam and Korean wars) the vegetarian diet is healthy.

How healthy is it really? Recently it was announced in the media that the famous Sir Paul McCartney of Beatles fame had an angioplasty last year. An angioplasty is a procedure that is used to increase the width of the arteries that feed the heart. It uses an uninflated balloon which is then inflated to force the opening of the artery to become larger. The reason the artery gets narrow is nothing to do with genetics or trauma but only due to the blood having too much fat and cholesterol in it.

Paul has been eating a vegetarian diet since his days with the Beatles when he first met his wife Linda Eastman, who by the way was also a long time vegetarian and passed away from breast cancer several years ago. Obviously both Paul and Linda were involved in many other lifestyle differences from the average person being in the spotlight and part of the rich and famous, but they were definitely both vegetarians for the most part of the last 35 years or so (Linda until she passed away).

If this diet style was so healthy there wouldn’t be the need to have any kind of heart or artery procedure. The human body is extremely capable of taking care of itself if given the correct inputs. A vegetarian diet is far from a correct input, especially one that includes dairy and egg products, but even one that excludes these products (the vegan diet) is not at all a healthy choice unless it is a strictly low fat vegan diet.

If you want to be different from the 97 to 98 percent of the population who are living with a time bomb in their chest, adopt a low fat vegan diet or at least a very low fat diet that includes no more than 10 percent of it’s calories from fat. You will be in the healthy minority, but it’s not a bad group to be part of.