Rakesh Sethi, BS, CAHP
Wellness Speaker/ Author/
Ayurvedic Practitioner
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Archive for the ‘Health & Wellness’ Category
What is the Future of Personalized Medicine?
Imagine having a “Bio ID” card with your unique characteristics. All your unique characteristics like Phenome, Genome, Micro-biome, Environmentonome, Diet, and Lifestyle are on the card. You could be cross the street or cross the continents, if needed; a practitioner can access your entire bio information and deliver a personalized medicine, necessary care, right there and then.
Imagine, based on your uniqueness, a practitioner mining through Health (IT) Systems like the intelligent evidence based decision support systems to offer you personalized missing healthy links and other preventative recommendations to prevent diseases in the first place.
On the other hand if intervening to address serious diseases, a practitioner will address the root cause rather than just the symptoms and that too using personalized medicine designed to suit your genomic make up which would not produce adverse side effects.
You could participate in your own healthcare every day. You could simply log-in to the health information system and perform what if analysis. Make adjustments to diet, lifestyle, and environment to see how it would impact your health, before making the changes. An intelligent decision support system in the health information system guides you and if you agree to make any changes, they become part of your health record.
Practitioners and people will change the way they approach the healthcare. The system would change from a disease management to a health management system. More emphasis would be on upfront disease prevention and health management.
Healthcare organizations will be rewarded for their performance of keeping assigned population healthy and not just for disease management. I am sure you can think of many other ways how information technology will play a role in our healthcare. We are just beginning. Will it be possible by 2025? What do you think?
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Healthy Eating Habits: It’s Not What, It’s How You Eat it?
In ancient Vedic times, offering food to the body with love was a ritual. This ritual is almost exactly the same as offering of foods and other things with love to the Gods in presence of fire and asking for their blessings in return. These rituals of offerings with love are found in many corners of the planet in different cultures. Now imagine offering of the food with love to the “fire” (of hunger) in our stomach and asking for blessings of a healthy body in return. Wouldn’t you agree, this is one of the very basic healthy eating habits?
Today we have scientific experiments that support this notion. One such experiment was conducted with rabbits.
One group of rabbits was fed unhealthy cholesterol rich food by throwing the food into their cage. The other group of rabbits was given the same unhealthy food but after holding and petting them with love. Results were startling different. Yes, you guessed it right! The group fed by food thrown into the cage developed heart and circulatory diseases while the group of rabbits fed with love showed a little or no adverse effects on their circulatory system.
Could we not take in food with love to maintain health of our own bodies? Of course we can and we must make time for it. 
If you are still with me, then you must be serious about making a fundamental change in your lifestyle for better health. You will find my passion in my in this and many other articles to inspire people to change. My goal is to awaken the “doctor” in you that you are born with.
Thank you for your time and attention. If you would like to join in my passion then the biggest tribute you can give is by sharing this information with others. You will raise their awareness to small fundamental preventive care tips offered here, promote health and wellness, and change their lives forever. Be Well!
PS: First step in changing your eating habits is to start Eating Suitable Foods not just healthy foods. Learn this know-how in FREE “simple secret to good health” mini course. Subscribe here:
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Health Conscious: Are You Born with This or Not?
Body’s natural state is health and it inherently gravitates towards health. No one doctor can give you health from outside. The outside sources can only help to remove diseases. Once the disease is removed, body restores itself to its natural state, health.
I think when it comes to health most people are health conscious and have an inkling of what is right choice and what is wrong. Then why is it that people often take the wrong choice? Okay I will accept in some cases people do not know but what about most people who hear and see many times what they ought to be eating and doing. Still they do not follow the advice, and knowing very well, take wrong decisions and land themselves a disease. What happened to their health consciousness?
Sense objects, in this case food, can have enormous power over one’s mind, even when the mind is healthy. And if one is going through depression, this power is even more gripping. Mind gets carried away by the senses; sight, smell, and taste of food. And the next thing you know is that outside elements have grab hold of your senses; as a consequence senses control your mind, and influence your decisions affecting your inner wellbeing.
The irony is your inner self is equipped with health consciousness and intellect, remarkable tools, to take decisions. However, yet your mind continues to take decisions without consulting with your health consciousness and intellect. You need to change the direction of taking your decisions.
Let the health consciousness guide your intellect to take a decision for inner wellbeing while the intellect keeps your mind under its strict control so it would not to be taken for a ride by the outside (sense objects). This is the right direction in taking decisions. Health consciousness, this “natural intelligence” resides within us. You are born with it! No one thing or person can “install” the natural intelligence from outside. Just because you don’t access it, it doesn’t mean you do not have it. You already have it in you, but it is dormant. It needs to be awakened.
You just need someone or something to awaken your consciousness to make you health conscious. This someone or something becomes the enabler for awakening the consciousness. It could be a person or perhaps even this article. You just need to find your own “enabler”.
You cannot lead your life by taking decisions at the surface level, namely under the influence of sense objects, and depending on external quick fixes, for example diet pills. You must take control of your life by taking decisions from the “depth” of your being. Stop taking decisions at the “surface” level. When consciousness, intellect, and mind are in agreement, lasting wellness dwells there. Isn’t it time you awaken your consciousness to become health conscious? Be Well!
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How Often to Have Sex to Stay healthy & Age Gracefully?
How often is it healthy to have sex? Is it beneficial to have more or less often? What is sex? The act of sex connects two beings physically, emotionally, and spiritually. However, if sex is reduced to just a physical act between two beings, its subtle underlying benefits diminish significantly. Human beings like physical touch, emotional engagement, and even spiritual connection. Sex is the only act during which two human experience oneness of all physical, emotional, and spiritual beings. Each being for those brief moments cease to exist by itself. During these moments, is it a human being having a spiritual experience or a spiritual being having a human. You decide. But either way sex plays an important role in our health and aging gracefully. Health and wellness is promoted from the most subtle spiritual levels to gross physical levels of our being.
What Constitutes Sex?
Sex between a loving couple is an intimate expression of love. Sex is often mostly associated to having “hot and steamy” intercourse. This is due to our culture creating such an image about sex. While at times a couple will have such enjoyable moments but the sex is not just restricted to that. In fact, if you live with such expectations, you could be in for a big disappointment. Especially as you age, the sex drive you had at the age of 30 will not be the same at the age of 60. However, the inherent drive for being intimate to give, and to receive love and affection is just the same. It is up to two people to decide how they would like to express their love and sex can take many forms. So continuously redefining your sexual intimacy can not only bring you pleasure but it is also good for your health and aging gracefully.
How Often to Have Sex?
This of course is a very personal preference. However, ancient medical system- Ayurveda offers some general guidance here. For a healthy person, it is based on how much sexual tissue a person can afford to lose in a particular time of the year (or season). Our body’s nature inside behaves according to the natural cycle outside. (however, our mind- that’s a different story) So follow the guidance below:
- In the fall/winter, body is in the fast “build & store” mode to deal with winter. If you lose sexual tissue, it is replenished quickly. So in the fall/winter you can enjoy sex once per day.
- In the spring, body is slowly relinquishing fat stored during winter to become light for summer. If you lose sexual tissue, it is replenished slowly. So in the spring you can enjoy sex twice per week.
- In the summer, body naturally wants to eat and stay light. If you lose sexual tissue, it takes a lot longer to replenish the tissue. So in the summer you can enjoy sex twice per month.
Note: Diet should be modified to match the seasonal requirements. Also age and other personal health conditions should be considered in forming your sexual habits. Going against the natural cycle means depleting your sexual tissues. The consequences of living with depleted sexual tissues is decreased immunity, infertility, and decreased energy. This in turn will make you susceptible to diseases, loss of health, and speedup aging.
When we follow the rules of how often to have sex, sex is not only a pleasurable activity that supports aging gracefully but also promotes health and wellness from the most subtle spiritual levels to gross physical levels of our being.
Health Tip: Use Amrit herbal formula to rejuvenate and build all tissues, including reproductive. Both men and women can take this as directed.
“Young Man Kissing his lovers neck” Image courtesy of stockimages at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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How a Movie Example can Teach Us About Spiritual Healing?
I want to share a short real life example that I hope will change the way you look at yourself and your role in this life forever. The wisdom in this example challenges your subtle intellect and awakens your spirituality to question your real-self and role in this life. As soon as you begin to practice this awareness, spiritual healing starts to replace your sufferings with peace, health, and wellness.
Do You Ever Question This After Watching a Movie?
A friend comes back after watching a movie. He can not stop talking about how good the movie was. The story touched him in many levels. Sometimes he laughed and another he even cried. I asked him why he liked so much. He liked it because the actors played their parts so real and the story unfolded beautifully not knowing what will happen next. These are main hallmarks of any good movie. He enjoyed the movie even though he cried through the tragic, depressing, and sad parts of the story. But if similar tragic events happened in my friend’s life, he wouldn’t enjoy the experience of suffering as he did while watching the movie. Why is that?
This is a question that warrants a closer observation. Is it because we enjoy watching tragedy in other people’s lives? I hope not. Or is it because, we engage with the movie as a witness knowing very well that all characters in the storyline are just actors. Each actor also knows it is a temporary role and not their real self so they also enjoy and do their best to play their role. In fact their real self is observing to make sure that their character comes across real whether it is rich, poor, good, funny, or tragic role. And after the movie is over, everyone goes on their new and separate ways.
Doesn’t That Sound Familiar?
Now think subtly. Isn’t this what happens in our life? We try to perform our role on this “stage” of life to the best of our ability in good, sad, or bad times. While performing, if we strictly identify with the physical self playing the character role permanently, we suffer. On the other hand while performing if we identify with our higher spiritual self (individual consciousness), we realize the character role we are playing is temporary, and our higher spiritual self is overseeing as a witness. Remember, my friend really enjoyed the movie as a witness. So it is with our life. Identify with your higher self, become and live as a witness, and enjoy while performing your physical role with full vigor and conviction. With such awareness, you enjoy playing any role just as the actors enjoy playing their roles in the movie.
Now Put This to Work for You
Can you cultivate this subtle shift in your awareness about your self? It will not be easy, especially the way we are programmed to live. You need to give your self time to reflect. Be among people with such attitudes. Read inspiring, motivating, and thought provoking writings, books, or poems. Recently I came across a wonderful collection of inspiring and spiritually healing poems and other work by an artist, Milo Adorno. Do whatever it is you need to do to cultivate this spiritual awareness.
I am not saying you have to enjoy your sufferings. I am saying that living with such spiritual awareness you can enjoy the experience of healing while suffering. One common theme that was found in most 70 and older healthy people aging gracefully was their ability to accept and then let go of the tragic events in their lives.
You see spiritual awareness causes subtle mental shift that creates powerful healing effect that permeates health and wellness through out your mind and body. In fact the impact of spiritual healing on our mind body health is far greater than the foods, herbs, or any other supplements.
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Anxiety Disorders: Natural and Herbal Anxiety Remedies
For natural herbal anxiety remedies to be effective, you must commit to changing your diet and life style. This particularly includes changing eating and living behaviors to remove mental and physical causes that increase your anxiety as discussed in the previous article.
The physical causes must be removed prior to beginning natural and herbal remedies for anxiety. In addition, the mental causes must be addressed with the physical treatment. Along with seeing a psychologist, you can significantly benefit by joining a local self help or support group and receive help by listening and sharing problems and achievements with each other.
Natural remedies for anxiety include the following suggestions:
Diet Modification:
- Always eat warm cooked food with a table spoon of olive oil (per day)
- No ice or ice cold drinks
- Eat 2-3 ounces of mixed nuts per day. Almonds should be soaked overnight in water, peeled and taken in the morning
Life Style Modification:
- Organize your day- make a list of things to do and stick to them (have ONLY reasonable #s on to do list)
- Perform oil massage 2 -3 times per week with Ayurvedic Massage Oil. Leave oil on for 20-30 minutes before taking shower
- Aerobics or fast paced exercise NO MORE than 2-3 times per week
- Include meditation and yoga exercises in your daily morning routine (20-30 minutes be fine
Supplements and Herbal Anxiety Remedies
- Take Vitamin B12 and 2000mg of fish oil daily after a meal
- Take 1000mg of Ashwagandha herb with warm milk after breakfast and 1000mg after dinner.
- Take 1000mg of Shankpushpi herb before bedtime with warm milk. If you have trouble sleeping, you can increase the amount up to 3000mg
You can purchase both herbs and Ayurvedic massage oil in our online store. The herbal anxiety remedies suggested are rejuvenating, relaxing, and not stimulating. They are nerve tonic for nervous exhaustion with no side effects. They promote tranquility without dulling the mind. DO CONSULT with your Ayurvedic practitioner and physician before making changes in your regimen. Be Well!
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Anxiety Natural Remedies and Causes
Anxiety is a reaction to inner unwanted thoughts, emotions, or impulses. Anxiety disorders affect almost 1 in 5 adult individuals that means about 40 million people suffer with some kind of anxiety disorder in United States. Anxiety disorders jeopardize person’s ability to function in personal, social, and professional life. Believe it or not, your diet plays a role in reducing or increasing anxiety. Good news is that there are natural anxiety remedies you can implement in your diet and life style to minimize the affect or completely cure the anxiety disorders. 
Causes
Before implementing anxiety natural remedies, you need to understand the causes of anxiety and remove them from your mind (mental) and body (physical). Mind-body wellness is intricately interwoven. One affects the wellness of the other. Physiology supports psychology and vice-versa.
Mental Causes: Thoughts and emotions are food for your mind. Be careful what you are carrying, you continue to take in, and dwell on. You must have someone trustworthy friend or psychologist to speak with to metabolize your “stuck” thoughts and emotions out of your mind. Read more in Mental Gingivitis article.
Physical Causes: Foods and drinks we take in can contribute to your anxiety. According many studies conducted in the last three decades: 
1. Alcohol and substance abuse can mask the anxiety symptoms or make them worse in some individuals
2. Caffeine, well known for causing anxious behavior in people, has anxiogenic effects that can amplify anxiety in some anxiety disorder patients offsetting any alertness benefits of caffeine
3. According to Ayurveda natural medicine, cold, raw, dry, processed, and pungent foods can increase anxiety in the individuals suffering from anxiety disorders. Yes, RAW foods, for some people they can create havoc.
Both physical and mental “foods” we take in affect the anxiety. Though the root cause of the anxiety lies in the mind, the physiology, eating right foods, must support the mind and should not aggravate or contribute to anxiety. First, you must remove the causes for any treatment to work and if you don’t anxiety will increase to panic and fear. If you are looking to use natural remedies for anxiety, then be prepared to treat both the physiology (body) and psychology (mind). Please proceed to next article for anxiety natural remedies.
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Vitamin D Foods: What’s so Hot About the Sunshine Vitamin?
In the past 5 years or so, we have seen a renewed interest in the sunshine vitamin because new data suggest benefits extending beyond bone health. Possibility of association of vitamin D deficiency has been described with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, pain, asthma, allergies, depression, multiple sclerosis, and even mortality. These reasons should be enough to convince us to add Vitamin D foods in our diet.
Rickets was first described in the 1600’s, as a disease of rich children (because they were getting less sunlight exposure than the poor). It was characterized by weak bones: bow-legs and bone pain. There is no question about the role of Vitamin D in bone health. Widespread use of cod liver oil and fortification of milk, foods containing vitamin D, led to the virtual disappearance of rickets in North America and Europe by the 1930’s.
Types of Vitamin D
Vitamin D comes in 2 forms: D2 or Ergocalciferol and D3 or Cholecalciferol
D3 is produced in the skin in response to sunlight (UV B radiation) or can be obtained from animal sources in the diet. D2 can only be acquired from a few plant sources.
Vitamin D Food sources: For vitamin D3 deep sea fatty fish, egg yolks, liver
Vitamin D Food sources: For vitamin D2 : rare sources in plants; primarily produced commercially by irradiation of yeast for fortification and supplementation
Foods containing both forms of vitamin D undergo identical metabolism. Both are converted to 25-hydroxyvitamin D in the liver and this 25(OH) D is used to measure vitamin D level in the lab. In the kidney, 25 (OH) D is further hydroxylated to 1, 25 (OH) D, which is biologically active form of vitamin D.
Vitamin D Deficiency and Diseases Research
1, 25 (OH) D has been well known to involve with calcium metabolism and bone health. The association between vitamin D insufficiency, sometimes defined as a level of 25 (OH) D below 30 ng/mL, and cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer, pain, asthma, allergies, depression, multiple sclerosis, and mortality is being intensely investigated. The most promising research is a National Institutes of Health funded clinical trial with 20,000 participants which started this year, and will last 5 years. This should help clarify the benefits and risks of vitamin D supplementation in our diet.
Vitamin D Dosage
Until the research results are in, it is perfectly reasonable to find out your vitamin D level. Include foods with vitamin D plus take 1000-2000 units of D3 as a supplement along with your fish oil and low dose Aspirin(if over 45 or as recommended by your doctor) to maintain your health and wellness.
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Right Eating and Herbs Help You Lose Weight Naturally and Fast
You will discover here how to lose weight naturally and fast using natural and less expensive remedies you can practice at home. Before discussing the usual diet & exercise for losing weight, I want to introduce the term Body Constitution. This is an important intelligence that will help you understand what are your weight gain and weight loss tendencies and work with them.
You and everyone else is put together with their own unique body constitution. For our purpose, we need to discuss 3 different body constitution types but focus on the one that has the highest probability of gaining and trouble losing weight:
- One body constitution type typically light weight if gains weight can loose it quickly.
- The second body constitution typically medium weight, good muscles but does not gain weight easily.
- The third body constitution type typically large gains weight quickly in pounds but looses slowly in ounces.
It is the third body constitution type that has inherent tendency to be bigger & heavier than the other two types. The standard medical height & weight guidelines do not apply to this third body type. However, if you fall in the third type, no worries; this in itself does not place you at higher health risk. But because of the inherent body tendencies, you will need to be more vigilant about weight gain, especially as you get up in the years. Typical health risks for this body type are diabetes, high BP, and high Cholesterol.
How to Lose Weight Naturally and Fast Techniques?
Before starting, I want you to ask yourself at what weight you feel full of energy, vivacious, and good about yourself. This is the optimum weight for you and you should try to maintain yourself within + or – 4 pounds of this weight. Follow the do’s & don’t’s of lose weight naturally and fast guidelines that can be easily used at home.
1. Don’t’s- what to avoid?
- Ice cold drinks with or before meal (No sodas)
- Raw vegetables, salads etc. as a meal or in large proportions
- Heavy fried foods and red meats (do not eat anything doesn’t come out in 24 hours or less)
- Cheese, Sweets, ice cream, & sugary temptations
- Alcohol (If you must small glass of wine 1-2 times a week)
- Overeating
2. Do’s- what to eat?
- Warm cooked foods
- Oats, Barley, Quinoa, Basmati Rice, & Millets (No other grains)
- Fish, Chicken in moderation, substitute legumes (rich in protein) for meat
- All vegetables especially include Bitter Guard (Bitter Melon) 2-3 times per week. Download recipes from internet for cooking Bitter Guard. Add ginger in almost every meal to your taste. Add pinch of red pepper to your taste, if you can tolerate.
- Only sunflower seeds (avoid all other nuts)
- Berries, grapefruit, pomegranate, apples
- Use light oils like sunflower
- Drink 2-3 cups of Ginger tea per day
- Do mindful eating & listen to your body when full. Make the middle meal your biggest meal of the day.
- Keep Fast once per week with only one light meal in the middle of the day
3. Yoga Postures (optional but will additionally help you lose weight naturally and fast)
Pranayama, Sun Salutation, Most forward or backward bend poses, Cobra, Downward Dog, Upward Dog, and Shoulder Stand poses. Start slowly if you are not doing any exercises then increase frequency & intensity. If you are doing some other form of exercise, just continue that. Do exercise 3 to 4 times per week.
4. Herbal Supplements
After dinner & lunch take 1000mg of Triphala and 1000mg of Guggulu.
Imagine in 4 short weeks you would lose weight naturally and fast, improve your health, appearance, live at your suitable weight, and cleanse your body of toxins.
NOTE: After reaching your suitable weight, continue maintaining with taking Triphala but stop taking Guggulu.
Thank you for your time and attention. If you liked this article then biggest compliment you can give is by sharing it with others. Be Well!
PS: To maintain your right weight, learn to Eat Right Foods suitable to your unique Mind-Body constitution, subscribe FREE to “simple secrets to good health with right eating” mini course.
