Basic Health Principles:

• Oxygen: Exposure to fresh air and sunlight. Keep your nostrils clear at all times with regular practice of Pranayama and Jalanethi
• Hygiene: Keep environment clean in body, mind and at home.
• Water: Drink 3 to 5 litres of water a day
• Food:
  • Eat to live but not live to eat!
  • Eat Healthy, timely and in limited quantities
  • Choose wholemeal foods
  • Make majority of your food with fresh vegetables and fruit
  • Observe 1 day or ½ day a week spiritual planned fasting
• Exercise: Spare an hour to practice Yoga and meditation for a sound mind in sound body
• Work is worship! Work efficiently with a plan and skill with honesty, integrity, confidence, ethics and without any stress. We must perform our duty with dedication and take responsibility of everything we do with commitment!
• Service: Spare some time for self-less service and make someone happy every day without expecting anything in return
• Be Responsible (Live and Let Live): live simple with minimum resources to allow others to live and protect environment. Spare some time for gardening and grow your food.

Key Actions to start Healthy Life style:

• Make your mind for positive change and be with positive hinking.
• Drink plenty of water.
• Keep nostrils clean all the time to supply good oxygen and sunlight.
• Eat Healthy and more fresh food and avoid junk.
• Observe fasting 1 day a week with spiritual discipline.
• Help some-one and be part of self-less service regularly.
• Spare an hour for Yoga and Meditation every day & practice with dedication.
• Be eco-friendly, live simple and natural.

Ideal Daily Schedule for Healthy life

Regular and consistent time schedule is key to be efficient and successful. It is important to keep daily routine with an effective schedule to make life much more efficient, sustainable and easy. Following is an ideal schedule which can generally fit to working people and professionals to maintain good health, to prevent and cure any ailments. One can make it suitable to their convenience depending on their job or work schedule. On the whole it is important to change the life style gradually and consistently to achieve this ideal state which fits to nature’s cycle as this schedule is designed based on “law of nature” and with proven methods. Go slowly and make one change at a time with a strong will and sustainable practice. If you stick to a schedule you can save lot of time and do things very efficiently.

Healthy Food:

Simple healthy food can be defined as “fresh, nutritious, natural, wholemeal and simple foods”, which provides essential nutrients and energy to sustain growth, stamina, health, happiness and life while satiating hunger. Bhagavad Gita has defined it as follows:

ayuh-sattva-balarogya- sukha-priti-vivardhanah
rasyah snigdhah sthira hrdya aharah sattvika-priyah: Gita 17.8

Foods dear to those in the mode of goodness increase the duration of life, purify one’s existence and give strength, health, happiness and satisfaction. Such foods are juicy, fresh, wholesome, and pleasing to the heart.

These days, people are confused with several options available in the market. Many people have no idea about how those foods are produced and what is really required nutrients for them. They blindly choose options with their sensory pleasures and temptations, which is a big catastrophe in current world while food businesses are making money with more unhealthy products. Many food products are making attractive packing with colourful pictures of health to attract people, which is a big cheating.  So it is more important to bring this awareness to everyone and every child to save them from such dangers for people’s health. For this cause Manavata volunteers are organising special healthy living workshops to communities and schools with some of the following simple methods:

Eat Natural and Fresh:

Following chart explains how food processing happens these days: red lines indicate threats for health. Thousands of items are made by processing basic elements. In the process, many items lose their original nutrients and some are added with artificial nutrients, preservatives added with more sugars and fats, which makes items more un-healthy. It is always good to choose sun dried natural whole grains rather than processed / polished / preserved items. (ex: unpolished rice or whole wheat are much better than bread / Noodles or Pasta, which are two levels below with fermentation and additives).

Healthy Recipes (Cook Healthy & Eat Healthy)

Best Cooks are the ones who can cook healthy without changing natural taste, without loss of nutrients and color of the main ingredients. They make nice food with natural tastes and they won’t use more than allowable limits of concentrated ingredients like salt, sugar, oil, butter, cheese & masalas etc. That means a cook is one who can always take care of both nutrition and taste.

Major threats for health come from use of saturated fats / concentrated items like salt, sugar and oil. So it is always best practice in cooking to avoid or use them in as less quantities as possible. General principles for healthy and testy recipes are:

• Use less temperature for boiling vegetables to avoid loss of nutrition and natural taste.
• Do not boil vegetables in water (as water boiling point is high) and do not fry them in oil.
• Steaming vegetables makes your cooking quicker and tasty.
• Always keep lid closed while boiling (use stainless steel vessels and avoid Teflon, aluminum vessels)
• Always use whole meal raw grains rather than polished or refined items. (eg. Instead of white rise you can go for brown rice, instead of white bread use brown bread, instead of white wheat use whole meal / brown wheat).
• Use fresh/raw ingredients rather than processed and preserved once.

Manavata Charity at home volunteers came up with an excellent set of healthy recipes, which will completely change your lifestyle for the better future of current society.

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