[{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BlogPosting","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#BlogPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/","headline":"Journal of an Ayurvedic Newbie: Starting the Year The Right Way","name":"Journal of an Ayurvedic Newbie: Starting the Year The Right Way","description":"Reading Time: 6 minutesOne of my personal mottos is, \u201cThere is no such thing as too much butter.\u201d I have never met a cookie I didn\u2019t like. And although I truly think of myself as a church-going, exercising kind of woman, I have only seen the inside of a church or a gym a handful of times in the past ... <div><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/\" class=\"more-link\">Read More<\/a><\/div>","datePublished":"2018-02-06","dateModified":"2019-07-02","author":{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/author\/gunnyyouveda-com\/#Person","name":"Gunny Sodhi","url":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/author\/gunnyyouveda-com\/","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/nsl_avatars\/fcde1a09301807b463d767e26f868b8e-1.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/nsl_avatars\/fcde1a09301807b463d767e26f868b8e-1.jpg","height":96,"width":96}},"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"YouVeda","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/youveda_logo.png","url":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/youveda_logo.png","width":190,"height":51}},"image":{"@type":"ImageObject","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/img-journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right.jpg","url":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/02\/img-journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right.jpg","height":700,"width":700},"url":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/","commentCount":"6","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment1","dateCreated":"2018-02-07 16:04:30","description":"Kathleen - thank you for your wonderful feedback. Diana wrote this beautifully and in a very relatable way as this was coming from here personal experience! She will be so happy to read the wonderful feedback. The specific product which Diana is writing about is, \"My Healthy Mood,\" and you can find it here:https:\/\/shop.youveda.com\/products\/mood.\n\nYou can also apply the following discount code, \"firsttime\" at checkout spelled just like that to receive a 30% off your first order to try the product.\n\nThank you once again for the feedback! We will be writing many more of these to come! :)","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Gunny Sodhi","url":""}},{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment2","dateCreated":"2018-02-07 16:01:18","description":"Tina - thank you for the lovely feedback! Diana is a very gifted writer and wrote this piece from her personal experience and from the heart! She will be so happy to read the lovely comment from everyone. We appreciate you taking the time to read this and providing your feedback, means a lot to us. Look for more blogs\/articles to come soon!","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Gunny Sodhi","url":""}},{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment3","dateCreated":"2018-02-07 15:59:23","description":"Thank you Joe for your feedback! We are so glad you enjoyed this blog article!","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Gunny Sodhi","url":""}},{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment4","dateCreated":"2018-02-07 15:49:53","description":"WOW Diana were do I get this product?  I am with you girl on this new ride to health and well-being!!!  I love the step by step description on how to get there.  Thank you!!!!  Your story motivates me!!!","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Kathleen Steoger","url":""}},{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment5","dateCreated":"2018-02-06 23:25:04","description":"Wonderful and inspirational article!","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Tina highsmith","url":""}},{"@type":"Comment","@id":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#Comment6","dateCreated":"2018-02-06 23:07:47","description":"Excellent!!!!!!!!","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Joe","url":""}}],"about":["Daily Routines","Lifestyle","Seasonal Guides"],"wordCount":1571,"articleBody":"Reading Time:  6 minutesOne of my personal mottos is, \u201cThere is no such thing as too much butter.\u201d I have never met a cookie I didn\u2019t like. And although I truly think of myself as a church-going, exercising kind of woman, I have only seen the inside of a church or a gym a handful of times in the past year.But the last few years have been emotionally and physically very hard on me. I got divorced after three decades of marriage, my son became mentally ill after a series of head injuries in college, an autoimmune disease wreaked havoc on my body, much \u00a0of my hair fell out, and my belly has now reached Buddha-like proportions.Clearly, a change is in order. It\u2019s just a coincidence this \u00a0change is happening near the beginning of the year, because it is long overdue. I am past the stage where I want to lie in bed with the covers over my head, but the events of the past five years have battered my spirit. It\u2019s not really true that what doesn\u2019t kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes it just kills you in a less obvious way.So I have decided to remake my life by diving into Ayurvedic habits big-time this year. I am opening up the capsules from YouVeda\u2019s My Healthy Mood packet and throwing them into my green smoothie each morning, \u00a0taking all the suggestions on the YouVeda app, and beginning to follow several of the 10 healthy Ayurvedic habits in Cate Stillman\u2019s excellent book, \u201cBody Thrive.\u201d It\u2019s quite a big step for me.I have never done yoga, except that one Hot Yoga class a friend forced me into where I couldn\u2019t decide whether I needed to pass out or throw up. It was the class where my friend kept apologizing to the instructor. \u201cIt\u2019s her first time,\u201d she said about 10,000 times.But on Day One, \u00a0I started the morning imagining that I was stepping into a bathtub with blue water, while breathing in and out. \u00a0I learned Lion\u2019s Pose, scaring the dog with my enthusiastic roars. I drank 6 glasses of water before my breakfast smoothie, and effortlessly drank about 120 ounces by day\u2019s end. \u00a0I got up at 5 and went to bed at 9:30. I started the day running up the stairs and doing jumping jacks for 20 minutes, so it felt easy to stay active and eat right the entire day. I was in such a good mood I could see my entire life furling out before me: I would drop 15 pounds just in time to wear a bikini to Mexico in February, cure my autoimmune disease, get my son back on his feet, and never say a harsh word to anyone again.That is, until I could not get the Wet Wipes open so that I could quickly grab one and wipe the \u00a0healthy green smoothie off my mouth before my morning job. \u00a0I could just not tell where the God-forsaken packet opening was. After all my industrious activity I was late, so a string of obscenities came hurtling out of my mouth. I doomed the Wet Wipes to hell.Clearly, the new protocol takes longer than one day to work.But I am excited about my new Ayurvedic habits. They already feel intrinsically right to me. \u00a0Here are the nuggets from Body Thrive \u00a0I found most helpful:Eat your last meal of the day by 6 or 7 p.m., at least three hours before bed. The earlier and lighter the better. Make it something full of water, like soup and salad. Your body digests heavy meals best at midday&#8211; it\u2019s a furnace between 10 and 2&#8211; and you are taxing your system too much to give it heavy food after the sun goes down. Ayurveda is all about following the rhythms of the day, and historically Homo Sapiens always ate during the day when they could see, so it makes sense. Brush and floss your teeth after that last meal, and you will be less tempted to snack. Isn\u2019t that a simple, but great tip?Try to go to bed with lights out by 10 p.m. at the latest. Get up and go to bed with the sun, and you will age better. I don\u2019t know about you, but Vanity always wins out over health with me. Say something will make me healthier, and it doesn\u2019t motivate me as much as it should.\u00a0 Say it will help my wrinkles and shrink my belly, and I am all over it.Upon waking, take two minutes in bed to think quietly about what you want to get out of your day. Once up, start drinking cups of warm or room temperature water. Start with one and try to work your way up to a quart. In my enthusiasm, I drank 6 cups of lemon water the first morning and have never had a better start to my day, and surprisingly it was effortless. The whole idea is to hydrate and flush out your system first thing in the morning, and it feels so right. Plus, I am convinced water fluffs up your face and makes it less wrinkly. Before this, I would go the entire day and realize I had not consumed one entire glass of water. But now that I am starting the day right, I actually feel like sipping water all day, and it doesn\u2019t feel like a chore at all. Water is life. Since then, I started adding a little cayenne pepper, apple cider vinegar, and turmeric to at least one cup of my warm lemon water a time or two during the day.Before breakfast, move your body for 20 minutes.I run up and down the steps and do jumping jacks, then take a short walk and follow it with a few yoga exercises on the YouVeda app. You could start with any movement you enjoy\u2014dancing, stretching, yoga. During this time, breathe deeply. You are trying to get your blood flow going, gorge on oxygen, and clear stagnation out of the body. Do deep, coordinated breathing\u2014anything from a brisk, deep-breathing walk to Sun Salutations. If you don\u2019t get in any other exercise during the day, you won\u2019t feel like such a sloth, but it actually got me in the mood to do more later.Power up your nutrition. Consciously think about eating a variety of vegetables and fruits&#8211; more than you ever have before.Nature gives us everything we need to heal ourselves in all those vegetables, so it\u2019s essential to eat a variety so we can be nourished by a buffet of vitamins and antioxidants. Try eating only 3 meals a day without snacking, and only when you are hungry. Drink only water between meals to empower your digestion to work undisturbed. If you constantly crave sweets, try eating bitter vegetables like kale, spinach or chard to cut the craving. I am Sugar\u2019s bitch, so this tip is saving me from desperately looking for the Nestle\u2019s semi-sweet baking chips in my pantry in the afternoon, or pawing through the garbage for the chocolate I just threw out. I\u2019ve been sauteing fresh spinach with oil or ghee and a little crushed garlic, and kale or beet greens are staples in my morning smoothie.\u00a0 And the simple little diet tips in the YouVeda app, like prepping healthy meals in advance so I don\u2019t resort to eating junk when I\u2019m hungry,\u00a0 are really helping me eat better already.\u00a0 It\u2019s amazing what justifications you can come up with when you\u2019re hungry: \u201cI deserve this, M&amp;M\u2019s aren\u2019t really THAT bad for you, and if you had my life, you\u2019d eat donuts, too.\u201d\u00a0 A little prep time makes a big difference.Sit in Silence. Start with one or two minutes and work your way up.\u00a0Set an alarm during the day and just stop, drop and sit. I like the words Stillman uses: meditation is our secret weapon, our savior, our salve. The meditation exercises on the YouVeda app are creative and addictive. When you start feeling stressed out, do a meditation. Today I meditated on the color indigo, imagining it spreading through all the veins in my body, and then letting it dissolve into white light. Maybe these little moments of new-found peace will keep me from hurting\u00a0 someone in rush hour traffic one evening.\u00a0 Indigo, indigo, indigo.This afternoon the fifth-grade boy I take care of after school took one look at me and immediately commented, \u201cYou look more fit today.\u201d This is the child who yells at me for eating his cookies and delights in informing me that I look old. When I protest that assessment, his little sister gangs up on me and sassily asks, \u201cDo you ever look in the mirror?\u201dWhen he unexpectedly gave me the positive feedback \u00a0today, I answered a bit defensively, \u201cWhat, are you implying I usually look fat?\u201d\u201cNo,\u201d he said, his gaze pointedly hovering on my mid-section, \u201cBut you honestly look three pounds lighter today.\u201dAfter a week of my new protocol, I am getting compliments from a \u00a0rude fifth-grader who \u00a0never misses a thing. \u00a0And maybe because of the My Healthy Mood packet, \u00a0I honestly feel better equipped to handle the mouthiness.Man, this Ayurvedic stuff rocks.Author: Diana WoodinYouVeda Wellness Contributor"},{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org\/","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Journal of an Ayurvedic Newbie: Starting the Year The Right Way","item":"https:\/\/www.youveda.com\/journal-of-an-ayurvedic-newbie-starting-the-year-right\/#breadcrumbitem"}]}]