Posts filed under 'Yoga'
Among a majority of regular practitioners of yoga who have been diagnosed as diabetic, their blood sugar levels have dropped from as much as over 400 to less than 160 over a fortnight. Even in case of less committed diabetic yoga practitioners significant improvement has been noticed.
This does not come to me as a surprise as the diabetics who have responded to yoga perhaps make for the largest category of chronic patients.
It is established beyond doubt that this system of breathing and mental exercises (pranayama) and simple diet have returned even the worst cases of diabetes back to normal life.
Pankaj Mehrotra was on dialysis when he joined a yoga camp two years back. He was a diabetic for more than 25 years. And he was just 45 when he took to pranayama and other exercises. He was unable to pay up the high cost of dialysis when a friend of his introduced him to the camp.
I remember him breaking down with grief often, as he expected to die at any time.
There was one positive thing about his condition though. LIke many people undergoing dialysis, he was on too frugal a diet to avoid build up of creatinine in his body. Yoga turned his condition around in less than two months. The creatinine levels came down significantly and he stopped attending dialysis.
He achieved a new lease of life without incurring high expense through th epower of yoga.
Suman Aggarwal was an overweight diabetic with heart disease and asthma. Arthritis had also started to affect her knees. She was put on a strict yoga regime which she could not take for too long. “I could not have given up on Chinese fast food and lot of sweets every day, so I gave up yoga. Before long, I was admitted to a hospital with a heart attack,” she recalls.
Suman survived but she lay on the bed for five months before she resumed pranayama just lying on the bed. After six months of yoga, Suman suddenly realized that she was healthy and spirited enough to pursue her childhood hobby – pottery.
June 12th, 2006
Written By: lalitgambhir
Ramji Bhai used to eat large quantities of meat every day, drink at least two bottles of alcohol every day and can’t remember how many packs of cigarettes he would smoke. Weighing 122 kilograms, he had many disorders ranging from hypertension to arthritis.
He lost nine kgs in seven days, after attending a strict yoga camp. Several months later, he looks taller at 82 kg having lost his girth and becoming a complete vegetarian and a teetotaler. His arthritis is almost over and hypertension, too, is in the past.
Quite a few friends of Ramji have taken to yoga too while others having found them boring have left their company. “Now I get back home from work early in the evening…no more socializing and boozing with friends….I have become a family man”, he says with a winning smile on his face.
Other students of the yoga camp have similar success stories too.
For Yoga enables our body to consume as little food as it needs.
Dependence on smoking and alcohol, according to the tenets of yoga, is the recipe to physical and spiritual downfall.
Yoga enables its practitioner to stop smoking and drinking alcohol over a period of time, though it takes an effort of willpower to move towards this abstinence.
Consumption of meats also follows suit – the intake of meat will reduce and become eliminated from one’s diet as one progresses with the yoga regime. Meat, as per yoga, is an unnatural food. It brings to its consumer the stock of all the stress hormones the animal has at the time of butchering apart from the excessive fat and the protein that again will convert into fat when it is assimilated into our body.
Vegetarianism, according to yoga is not a choice but the only way of life.
Cigarettes have no place in the life of a yogi, the yoga practitioner. Smoking must be avoided to get better results in a weight management program under yoga. Smoking stimulates artificial hunger through increase in digestion and the other metabolic activities, thus forcing overeating.
As one progresses through a yoga regime eating itself gets curtailed as less food suffices. One tends to sleep less too and the energy level maintains all day long. This happens over a few days of yoga practice
One is advised to take his weight before one starts with yoga and check it every few days - the gradual reduction in weight will be very pleasing.
June 8th, 2006
Written By: lalitgambhir
My sister 32-year old Shivani, once a brilliant student of political science and a skilled exponent of Indian classical dance, started suffering from rheumatoid arthritis 12 years ago.
The first signs of the disease appeared while she was taking her final undergraduate examinations. She knew her dreams of pursuing higher studies would remain unrealized. She was selected in one of the top institutions to do her masters but she could not even get out of the car and walk up to see her name among the selected candidates on the notice board of the institution of her choice.
With all kinds treatments and physiotherapy notwithstanding her active arthritis just would not abate and it pained as if a “fully loaded truck was passing over me in slow motion”, she recalls.
She was left a cripple with severe deformities of the limbs at the joints, no cartilage left to cushion the movement, but contractures and thinning, ever wasting bones. All surgeons were of the same opinion - go for TKR, total knee replacement. But there was a lurking fear that artificial joints might not work on a frail frame she had, my internet research warned me.
That was till about a year back before Yoga happened to us. While I put my sister on the pranayama, the breathing exercises regime, I joined the classes to learn the system. I became a practitioner and a teacher of Yoga.
Shivania’s deteriorating condition was checked in about two months and she could feel the signs of recovery. Her limbs started loosening up at the joints. Painkillers were forgotten and steady progress became a reality.
Shivani still finds it little difficult to do physical exercises, hence she has slow progress. But a definite one at that.
Yoga has been transforming Shivana when nothing else would work.
June 6th, 2006
Written By: lalitgambhir
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