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I have two secrets to good health:
Yoga and Coconut Oil.
 Yoga won't surprise anyone: it's bigger than it's ever been these days, and with photos of Madonna with her legs twisted around her neck in the daily papers more and more people are taking it up, though with questionable motivation.
I was a miserable teenager: insecure, disoriented and fat. At the age of 18 I went to my first Yoga class – and my life turned around 180 degrees. Yes, it was that dramatic. Within a month I had lost my excess weight, stopped smoking and drinking, and felt on top of the world; and I never looked back.
At that time Yoga was not the trendy must-do fitness craze it is now. We did not have celebrities producing videos or twisting their legs around their necks. I was on my own. In fact, people thought I was pretty weird; nobody I knew had ever heard of Yoga, and if they had, they thought it was some crazy cult from the East. But I was in the grip of something bigger than myself; it wasn’t just the change in my appearance and my habits that kept me going. It wasn’t just a fitness regime or a get-slim programme. It was a whole new perspective on life, and it wasn’t long before I moved from Hatha (physical) Yoga to meditation, and from Guyana to India. It was all or nothing.
In India I deepened my practice in an Ashram – not the kind of expensive retreat, overrun by Westerners, which came into fashion in the last ten years, but a quiet, out-of-the-way, traditional refuge where everyone minded their own business and got on with their internal journey. The teaching there is Advaita Vedanta.
The journey’s goal is the knowledge of self; Self - not to be mistaken with ego. Vedanta teaches that the self we all refer to as I – our ego – is but an incomplete, constantly hungry crust on the consciousness that is our true being. As long as we are cut off from that underlying being we are unfulfilled, craving, needy.
Yoga is a path by which we reconnect with our true selves; it’s nothing extraneous, nothing we need to gain, but simply turning back, reconnecting, to who we really are. It is a path, a life adventure, where the scenery changes constantly and becomes more beautiful as we progress – but also steeper, more difficult, more demanding. It is the end to neediness, and the beginning of true independence and fulfilment. It might be a cliché but happiness does come from within – quite literally.
Yoga teaches that though the goal is one, there are as many paths to it as there are people; that every religion is a path back to ourselves; that God is not a white man in the sky but at the very core of our consciousness. It’s a path back to ourselves.
Meditation opens up areas of our minds we never knew existed, releases skills we never knew we had. For me, it was a direct path to a centre of creativity; writing is simply a matter of turning inwards to that centre where all stories are born.
That’s why I always say: my life is a novel, in which I’m the main character, and I can’t wait to turn the next page. Isn’t that what life’s about?
Coconut Oil might surprise a few - it has such a bad reputation! because it's a saturated fat many people link it to high cholesterol and heart disease. That is utter rubbish - nothing could be farther from the truth. Scientific studies have repeatedly shown that people with a diet high in coconut oil actually have a far lower rate of these conditions than others.
Coconut oil, in fact, is probably the healthiest oil on earth. It contains Medium Chain Fatty Acids, in particular Lauric Acid, which is almost identical to Mother's Milk, with the same healing properties. It protects against infection and degenerative disease, and can even help you to lose weight! That's because it's not digested like other fats - it goes straight to the liver where it is converted into energy. After taking coconut oil you can actually feel that energy - your metabolism swings into a higher gear, and you start burning fat. I lost 20 pounds since I started using coconut oil - and it's weight that has stayed off.
For more information on the benefits of coconut oil, see http://www.coconutresearchcenter.org/. To purchase coconut oil, please use your search engine - and search beyond page one, which is dominated by one single company.
Further Reading on Coconut Oil:
Health Oils from the Tree of Life: Nutritional and Health Aspects of Coconut Oil By Jon J. Kabara, Ph.D.
(Needs Adobe Acrobat Reader)
COCONUT OIL and AIDS/HIV
The Benefits of Coconut Oil by Dr. Raymond Peat
Return from the Jungle - An Interview with Chris Dafoe
Why Coconut Oil is Good For You By Dr. Lita Lee, Ph.D.
Loaded with Health Benefits! Dr. Joseph Mercola on Coconut Oil
Good Health in the 21st Century: Dr Mary Enig
A New Look at Coconut Oil by Dr Mary Enig
And last but not least: all about coconuts at the Coconut Research Center.
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