By John Douillard, DC, PhD
Natural Weight Balancing through Ayurveda
Several years ago an eye opening study told us that about 80% of all disease is caused by stress. This, I am sure, is one of those studies that makes you wonder how they could not have known that till now.
Ayurveda, on the other hand, is a system of medicine that is premised on the fact that disease is caused by stress. Ayurvedic doctors knew that stress would lodge toxins deep in the tissues, and the body would hold on to this stress for life. The stress creates tension which reduces blood supply and isolates stressed areas of the body from the intelligence and nutrition of the whole. Cells under such stress begin to act in the name of survival, where anything goes just to stay alive.
A great book called The Molecules of Emotion, written by Candice Pert, Ph.D, from the National Institutes of Health, talks about how the emotions of fear, worry, anger and others have a form and lodge themselves deep in our tissues as toxins, predisposing us to illness. Ayurveda knew this 5000 years ago and designed therapies to reverse this condition, called panchakarma.
A few years ago I had a patient who was very overweight. I helped her with lifestyle, diet and exercise, and although we had success it was slower than we had hoped.
We decided to try Ayurveda's heavy artillery, and she went through seven days of panchakarma. After that first week of panchakarma she told me that she felt that the memory to hold onto the fat was in her cells. "My cells," she said, "don't know how to do anything else but be fat." During the treatments she felt this memory begin to soften, and the stress that held the fat cells steadfast was slowly letting go. She did two more rounds of panchakarma, and by the end of that year she had lost 125 pounds. She says that the weight just fell off, and it was one of the easiest things she ever did. This dramatic weight loss came about after years of conventional dieting, exercise and, of course, starvation.
Stress, be it mental, physical or emotional will have its own unique impact on us. Some people get heartburn or become constipated, tired or depressed, while others get a more stern wake-up call with cancer, MS or diabetes. In Ayurvedic medicine the therapies are designed to replace the impact of stress in the body with silence. The same serenity we find in nature belongs inside of us, but stress strips it away from us.
Special therapies were designed in Ayurveda to disarm the nervous system and access the deep tissues where all the emotional and constrictive stress is stored. The program starts with seven days of preparation therapy to soften the tissues and begin relaxing the nervous system. This is followed by a series of panchakarma treatments, where for 2 1/2 hours a day, therapies are administered, often with two therapists, that are designed to lower the metabolism, access the deep tissues, pull toxic and emotional stress out, and replace it with a deep experience of calm created by the therapies day after day for seven days. Research on these therapies done at Ohio State University found that the benefits of the treatments continued for 4-6 weeks after the therapies were completed.
Probably the best part of these treatments is that they were originally designed for Kings and Queens, which means that they will take you way beyond your current definition of luxury.
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