Holistic Health Recommendations

Practiced for over 5,000 years in India, Ayurveda is the health-care manual for balanced energy and finding relief from ailments that affect a woman’s well-being. Certified Ayurveda practitioner Emily L. Glaser shares her knowledge of this holistic medicine in an accessible way—with guidance on how to integrate Ayurveda on the path toward healing and balanced living. The power of Ayurveda’s timeless wisdom, writes Glaser, can be found in the kitchen and what you put in your body. Every meal is an opportunity to choose food as medicine, and when you do, Ayurvedic cooking can be a powerful approach to taking control of your health while supporting the demands of day-to-day life.

Wouldn’t you like to live longer? And better? In this operating manual for longevity, Dr. Peter Attia draws on the latest science to deliver innovative nutritional interventions, techniques for optimizing exercise and sleep, and tools for addressing emotional and mental health. For all its successes, mainstream medicine has failed to make much progress against the diseases of aging that kill most people: heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and type 2 diabetes. Too often, it intervenes with treatments too late to help, prolonging lifespan at the expense of healthspan, or quality of life. Dr. Attia believes we must replace this outdated framework with a personalized, proactive strategy for longevity, one where we take action now, rather than waiting. This is not “biohacking,” it’s science: a well-founded strategic and tactical approach to extending lifespan while also improving our physical, cognitive, and emotional health. Dr. Attia’s aim is less to tell you what to do and more to help you learn how to think about long-term health, in order to create the best plan for you as an individual. In Outlive, readers will discover: • Why the cholesterol test at your annual physical doesn’t tell you enough about your actual risk of dying from a heart attack. • That you may already suffer from an extremely common yet underdiagnosed liver condition that could be a precursor to the chronic diseases of aging. • Why exercise is the most potent pro-longevity “drug”—and how to begin training for the “Centenarian Decathlon.” • Why you should forget about diets, and focus instead on nutritional biochemistry, using technology and data to personalize your eating pattern. • Why striving for physical health and longevity, but ignoring emotional health, could be the ultimate curse of all. Aging and longevity are far more malleable than we think; our fate is not set in stone. With the right roadmap, you can plot a different path for your life, one that lets you outlive your genes to make each decade better than the one before.

Do you find yourself stuck in unproductive thought loops? Do you worry about things that might happen in the future? Do you replay conversations in your head, dissecting every word, body language, and tone in a desperate attempt to uncover hidden meanings? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you are not alone. According to Forbes, 57% of women and 43% of men say that overthinking immobilizes them. While these statistics don’t look promising, the good news is that your thoughts do not determine your identity. Overthinking is simply a bad habit you can defeat. We live in a world where society dictates who we are supposed to become. This pressure leads to insecurity and self-doubt. People feel they need to have it all together at all times or they will face judgment. One of the consequences of this pressure is overthinking, and statistics reveal it has become a silent epidemic.

Why do certain foods harm some people and help others? How come the same weight loss program shows different results on different individuals? And, why do some people fall sick more often than others? Answers to these questions and many more lie in Ayurveda where your body is not just looked upon a holder of flesh and bones but the finest vehicle of experiencing all pleasures and sorrows. In Ayurveda, as in yoga and tantra, the health of an individual is not just the state of his physical body but an aggregate of the body, senses, mind and soul. Your body is a sacred space, it is the seat of your consciousness.The Sanskrit word for health is svasthya; it means self-dependence or a sound state of the body and mind. If examined further, it means your natural state; sva means natural and sthya means state or place. Ayurveda aims to restore your natural state, balance so you may be free of mental and physical afflictions. More often than not, and certainly in adults, most physical disorders are the result of a repressed and bruised consciousness. Mental afflictions create diseases in the physical body and physical diseases, in turn, disturb the state of mind. You can treat the disease in the physical body but that's merely treating the symptom. It is not the permanent solution.The modern system of medicine is mostly symptom driven. If I have a headache, it'll tell me to take a pain-killer. Ayurveda does not believe in treating the symptoms. Its advocates understanding the patient and treating the cause of the symptom and not the symptom itself. In order to do that, the ancient scriptures took a far more holistic approach to health by combining our lifestyle with our natural tendencies (which vary from one person to another). In other words, it understood that one man's medicine could be another man's poison. Expounding on the esoteric aspects of the ancient wisdom, in simple terms, this book shows you how to take care of yourself better and how to lead a healthier life in our present world — a world where we have all the comforts yet we are restless. We have organic breakfast on the table but no time to eat it, we've the comfiest mattress but little sleep. The key to wholesome living and your wellbeing is entirely in your hands. This book is a must read for those who are serious about their health.ABOUT THE AUTHOROm Swami is a mystic who lives in the Himalayan foothills. An advanced yogin, Swami did thousands of hours of intense meditation in complete seclusion in Himalayan caves and woods. Prior to renunciation, he founded and ran a multi-million dollar software company with offices in San Francisco, New York, Toronto, London, Sydney and India. An Australian national of Indian origin, Swami completely renounced business interests a few years ago to pursue a full-time spiritual life. Om Swami has a bachelor’s degree in business and an MBA from Sydney, Australia. You can connect with him on his blog, omswami.com, read by millions all over the world.

Gabor Maté’s internationally bestselling books have changed the way we look at addiction and have been integral in shifting the conversations around ADHD, stress, disease, embodied trauma, and parenting. Now, in this revolutionary, bestselling book, he eloquently dissects how in Western countries that pride themselves on their health care systems, chronic illness and general ill health are on the rise. So what is really “normal” when it comes to health? For all our expertise and technological sophistication, Western medicine often fails to treat the whole person, ignoring how today’s culture stresses the body, burdens the immune system, and undermines emotional balance. In The Myth of Normal, co-written with his son Daniel, Maté brings his perspective to the great untangling of common myths about what makes us sick, connects the dots between the maladies of individuals and the declining soundness of society, and offers a compassionate guide for health and healing. The result is Maté’s most ambitious and urgent book yet.

Being Mortal looks at the way modern medicine has changed the experience of dying, what the implications of this change are for each of us, and what we would need to do to change a system that knows a lot about prolonging life but little about tending to death. At the heart of this book is something larger and more lasting than even its agenda for how to effect change: it is a deeply humane portrayal of how our society copes with who we really are. We are not economic beings. We are not political beings. We are not digital beings or analog beings, social beings or solitary beings. We are mortal beings. And in that is every important thing to know about how we must live.

Trauma is a fact of life. Veterans and their families deal with the painful aftermath of combat; one in five Americans has been molested; one in four grew up with alcoholics; one in three couples have engaged in physical violence. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, one of the world’s foremost experts on trauma, has spent over three decades working with survivors. In The Body Keeps the Score, he uses recent scientific advances to show how trauma literally reshapes both body and brain, compromising sufferers’ capacities for pleasure, engagement, self-control, and trust. He explores innovative treatments—from neurofeedback and meditation to sports, drama, and yoga—that offer new paths to recovery by activating the brain’s natural neuroplasticity. Based on Dr. van der Kolk’s own research and that of other leading specialists, The Body Keeps the Score exposes the tremendous power of our relationships both to hurt and to heal—and offers new hope for reclaiming lives.