“When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use; When diet is correct, medicine is of no need”

Ayurveda, apart from providing various therapeutic measures for diseases, emphasizes maintenance, promotion of health and prevention of diseases through diet and lifestyle regimens. As per Ayurveda, life is sustained by a triploid of mental, physical and spiritual factors constituted by the body (Sharir), senses (Indriyas), mind (Satwa) and spirit (Atma). 

Ayurveda places great emphasis on prevention and encourages the maintenance of health through close attention to balance in one’s life, right thinking, diet, lifestyle and the use of herbs. Knowledge of Ayurveda enables one to understand how to create this balance of body, mind and consciousness according to one’s constitution and how to make lifestyle changes to bring about and maintain this balance. Just as everyone has a unique fingerprint, each person has a particular pattern of energy—an individual combination of physical, mental and emotional characteristics—which comprises their constitution. 

Examples of emotional and physical stresses include one’s emotional state, diet and food choices, seasons and weather, physical trauma, and work and family relationships. Once these factors are understood, one can take appropriate actions to nullify or minimize their effects or eliminate the causes of imbalance and re-establish one’s original constitution. Balance is the natural order; imbalance is disorder. Health is order; disease is disorder. Within the body, there is a constant interaction between order and disorder. When one understands the nature and structure of disorder, one can re-establish order.

Ayurveda Improves the Quality of Your Daily Life - Benefits of Ayurveda lifestyle

1. Better Quality of Life

Quality of life is fundamentally about living in a state of health, happiness, security and peace. As we age, particularly after we cross age 30 or 40, certain aspects of our health start to diminish: sexual vigour, stamina, endurance, physical strength, mobility, flexibility, athletic skills, and other aspects of physical life. We start to develop nagging aches and pains that we accept as "normal" and just part of getting old. Ayurveda offers us tools to counteract the aging process, slow it down, and maintain mobility, flexibility, and a pain-free body even as we age.  

2. Lifestyle Optimization

Lifestyle optimization is about getting the most out of daily life: becoming more efficient; utilizing our time better; doing the right things at the right time; becoming more productive; identifying self-sabotaging behaviour and making adjustments; and making incremental improvements to our lifestyle through, for example, adopting one new positive habit a month. If you are wondering how to get more out of life and how to become more efficient and productive, Ayurveda offers a number of pointed tips and prescriptions. 

3. Better Diet

Ayurveda can teach us how to eat better: the right times to eat; the right foods for our body type; the right combinations of foods; and what foods to eat to address certain ailments or health objectives. The Hippocratic dictum, "Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be thy food", is entirely consistent with Ayurvedic tradition and thought.

4. Better Sleep

As we get older, many of us tend to lose sleep. We lose sleep due to stress, wrong feeding habits, false beliefs, imbalances in the body, and other reasons. Ayurveda can help us to identify the things that are impediments to good sleep. Ayurveda also offers certain medicines, home remedies, and lifestyle tips that can enable us to take back control of our sleep. It may take time and nothing happens overnight, but if you truly want better sleep without getting hooked on sleeping pills, Ayurveda offers sustainable and healthy solutions. 

5. Better Exercise

As we get older, exercise becomes more and more challenging. It becomes harder to lose weight. It becomes harder to maintain our stamina and do cardio for as long as we used to do. It becomes harder to devote time for exercise as our commitments grow. And if we are fortunate to achieve material success, secure that dream job, make crazy amounts of money, and/or secure that dream partner and dream relationship, we sometimes lose motivation to exercise because we have everything we want or we have other things making us happy. But the reality is that our health is partly dependent on how much we exercise and how regularly we exercise.

6. Detoxification

Toxins are the root cause of disease according to Ayurveda. Therefore, detoxification is extremely important for maintaining good health. Ayurveda tells us that the body has certain in-built mechanisms that perform detoxification on a daily basis, naturally and often unconsciously.

Ayurveda offers certain systems and routines to help us detoxify on a daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal and annual basis.

7. Pain Relief

Pain is an unavoidable, and often inconvenient, reality of life. As much as we don't like it, we will have to deal with it. In dealing with it, we have essentially two choices: we can rely on others to treat our pain or we can learn the Ayurvedic techniques of self-care to manage and mitigate pain. There are various herbal remedies, home remedies, supplements and decoctions in Ayurveda that enable us to manage pain and there are certain lifestyle injunctions that we can follow to prevent pain.

8. Curing the Incurable

Many people are told that there is no cure for their condition. Many are told that they will have to live with a certain ailment for life and/or manage it through medication. The history of Ayurveda is replete with stories of people who have been miraculously healed from debilitating conditions and terminal illnesses, including cancer and auto-immune diseases. The ability to recover from a serious illness depends not just on the doctor, the medicines and the course of treatment, but also, on the mindset, attitude, and cooperation of the patient. Very often, a healing must take place in the heart and mind before it can take place in the body.