Fasting is a scary word for most of us. I tried fasting multiple times but failed. Failed in controlling my hunger during fasting, I walked into the kitchen subconsciously and ate something.

It was the month of Apr 2020. The lockdown was on when I first understood the importance of food and its connection with energy.

When Food is always believed to be connected with energy, not eating makes you feel dizzy and sometimes crash out of low energy. I saw people sleeping most of the time during their fasting that made me assume that fasting is a challenging activity that is not everyone's cup of tea.

If you go deep into the secrets behind the energy of our body, you know that gaining energy from food is a half-truth. So come out of this mindset that if you don't take food, you will become weak. There is evidence when a person stayed healthy and fit by just drinking water for many days. There are also a few examples where the person didn't take food life long and stayed healthy. 

We take energy from multiple sources of nature other than food. Also, we deplete energy in multiple ways, knowingly or unknowingly. 

If we are planning to do fasting, we can follow the below steps or ways to make it pleasant.

Disclaimer: "A diabetic person should consult a doctor before fasting"

1) Two types of fasting: 

a) 24 hour fasting 

b) 36-40 hours fasting. 

> 24 hours fasting: This starts from dinner time to the next day dinner time. Say you took dinner today at 7PM and on fasting for 24 hours, you can break the fast by taking juice next evening around 7PM. 

> 36-40 hours fasting: This starts after today's dinner to next Next day Breakfast. When I first did fasting, I could do 40 hours fast easily.  If you have taken dinner around 6-7PM today, and not eat anything for the next 40 hours. You can drink only water and green warm tea all day. Day after tomorrow you can break your fast with juice around 9-10AM. 

About Juice for breakfast: It's important to break your fast with juices only. It should be fresh fruit juice with no sugar or milk. Juice shouldn't be filtered. It should be pulpy juice or you can call it smoothie. The reason for the juice is: our stomach was resting and was in process of detox. We should give it soft things which can be easily digested. Juices are great in that respect. one hour after juice you can eat whatever you like. It should be only fruit juice and not milk shake. The reason behind this is milk is tough to digest hence heavy on the stomach.

2) Start your day on Fasting: On fasting day,Start your day with morning rituals. Do bed yoga and get up with a smiling face. Do affirmations when you are still in bed like:

   Thank God for giving me a new day. I am healthy and joyful. I love and accept myself. 

Once you are out of bed, put Gayatri mantra or simple OM or any mantra of your choice. Mantra vibration, Nada Yoga is a great source of energy. It makes our mind calm and increases focus.

3) Connect with Nature: Sun and Air. On fasting days take a long walk in the morning, morning yoga at the time of sunrise is very helpful.  Pranayam, alom vilom and bhramari can be done properly. deep breathing is also a must.  Deep and slow breathing quickly gives energy to our body. This should be done 3-4 times on a fasting day.

How to deep breathing: Sit in a comfortable position. With the opening of your arms, take a deep breath, hold it for a few seconds, and with closing arms breathe out. You should do it 30 times in one cycle. This can be done 2-3 times.

If you are in the office, you can go for a quick walk of 10 minutes. While walking you can breathe slowly and deep.

4) Brain Fasting: Fasting is always misunderstood only with food. To make fasting pleasant, we should always do brain fasting along with food fasting. What does it mean?  Most of our body energy is consumed by the brain. Hence, even if we don't do much physical work, but take stress or do work that requires a lot of brain activity, we feel tired and exhausted.  

On fasting day, avoid TV and news completely. Take calls which are really important. postpone other calls for the next day. Keep mobile away as much as possible. Avoid talking much. It's "me time". Try to be with yourself. The more we calm our brain, the easier and happier our body will be during fasting.

5) Drink water or green tea: Make sure that you have a good intake of water. You can also make green tea and keep it in a bottle. Keep drinking it all day. Do not let yourself be thirsty anytime. Saliva is also a good source of energy which goes slowly in the stomach with water.

Green Tea or herbal drink: you can make a quick herbal tea by adding cinnamon, elaichi and tulsi in hot water. You can also add honey also for taste.

6) Meditation: Since you are not eating today, it saves your lunch and dinner time. You can do meditation. Put any guided meditation and relax your body completely. You can lie down or sit and do meditation is your choice. 

If you are in the office, you can escape in some meeting room during lunch break or in the worst scenario, you can sit in the toilet as well. Put earphones and switch on a guided meditation. 

7) Proper sleep Follow night rituals to get proper sound sleep. Deep leg in hot water with salt, take warm water bath, keep mobile away 1-2 hours before sleep, no TV, news or even book reading. plan your next day and sleep with meditation.

Fasting is a day to cherish and celebrate with yourself.

Benefits of fasting: reduces Obesity, burns fat, reduces chances of chronic diseases, improves heart health, removes toxic from the body, boosts immunity. 

Practice fasting proper way and let us know how was your experience by commenting below:

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Prashant is also an Author of the Amazon India bestseller book, "The 7 Productivity sutras for Professionals"

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Holding breath is always part of the old age Yoga technique. Paranyam one step of yoga trains you to hold breath. Although nothing is mentioned related to holding breath underwater.

The only benefit I can see underwater is that you will not voluntarily inhale so easily when you are underwater compared to a normal environment. So you will be able to hold for a longer time and master yourself faster in this skill.

Benefits of holding breath:

Photo Courtesy: google

Holding your breath is an important part of your health and must be included in your daily exercise routine.

this helps in:

1. Detox your body. When we hold breath brain and good cells know that holding breath is intentional but some bad cells of the body get no oxygen for some time and become ineffective. This helps in removing a lot of bad or worn-out cells and viruses.
2. Increases the life span of stem cells by reducing its activity. Healthy cells life increases hence your ageing process slows down.
3. Gives scope of regeneration of new tissues hence brings glow on face and skin.
4. It also helps to build immunity. How? Virus and bacteria got a tendency to attack weakest and bad cells. Holding breath helps in getting rid of such cells hence virus and bacteria attack can be reduced drastically.
5. Helps in better focus and concentration.

Thanks for asking this question. This is a simple exercise but very effective. include in your daily morning routine and whenever you feel down in a day. This gives a good flow of energy and reduces the urge to take caffeine.

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Women empowerment and women equality are two concepts which were discussed and tried to impose a lot during last 1-2 decades. 

Women were made to believe that they are not living enough and had to work harder and on multiple chores at the same time.

They should do all what men are doing and obviously they can't do away with household chores they are assigned with socially. 

There are lot of jargons which is being used by so called educated society even now. 

for example:

"Isko to bete ki tarah paala hai" (I have brought her up like a son)

"beti hai lekin shouk saare ldkon waale hain" (She is my daughter but all hobbies are of boys.)

Not only that, boys are always made to feel that they are not for doing household work. Moment small boy goes inside kitchen picks up some dough while mom is rolling chapati,or shows interest in cleaning house with mom or elder daughter, comment will appear as :

"Isko to ladki paida hona chahiye tha" ( He should have born like a girl).

"hobbies iske ladkiyon jaise hain" (His hobbies are like girls)

Boys who hear these type of comments since childhood refrain themselves from doing any household work. They suffer a lot when they grow up and forced to live alone for their higher studies or job. Mom has done all the cleaning and arranging house and he got no clue how to do this. He can't cook anything himself and either forced to eat outside everyday or eat burnt chapati or half cooked rice if he tries cooking himself. At this point, he gets another enlightenment " I should get married now so that someone can do all this for me". While wife expects him to help in house chores, only best thing he can do in his free time is to sit in front of TV.

If we look around, world has changed so much. Girls has conquered invincible territories.They are now even in Army and Air force, entrepreneurs and leaders. Same time men turned out to be world best chefs, great mind in managing house and more productive in their house chores activity, stitching, drawing painting etc. They are raising flag high in all these fields.

 Still a long way to go for a change in society thought process. Society has even tagged color with gender. Blue is for boys and pink is for girls. Heel shoes is for girls only. Making yourself look presentable is girl's activity.  If we look into history, pink color was initially only for king dresses. Heel shoes were also designed for horse riding for boys.

When society tried to put clear line of boys and girls, new women empowerment and women equality added woos in women life. While women got to cover their assigned work, they also have to bite a part of boys designated work. 

In recent times when requirement circle grew bigger and job uncertainty went up women started feeling that they should stand on their feet and give contribution in family budget an country's GDP, they went out looking for job.

All their little time left from office work is spent or better say drained in house work. There is high expectation during weekend on varieties of food everyone want to eat. They should also spend good time in teaching kids at home as we say "Mother is the first teacher". In few homes, husband try to take lot of housework to support them. Still God has created women in such a way that lot of work can be done only by them like having kids, feeding them and take care of them till certain age. No one can replace mother for such activities. These activities keep women busy 24x7. No holidays, no break.

They keep their dreams and hobbies aside with comment: "Family ke liye maine sab kurban kar diya" (I sacrificed all for family). 

Those 4-5 days every month, designated by God for her to rest is also taken away by multiple pads in market. In history, they were sent to different room during that period and not allowed to enter in kitchen. That time was for them to take total rest.

So what's the solution:

When one member of family got good job to make the ends meet, another member can look into option to work on their hobby, passion and dreams.

Family food habits can be transformed in such a way that it turns to be more healthy and less effort in cooking. For example depending more on live food like fruits and uncooked vegetables, sprouts, soup and salad will reduce cooking time. It will be healthy as well.

Minimalism living style. Family can try to live in minimum required things at home and in life. Living with minimum gives you more time to do work you should focus on.  Since it will reduce the requirement, we can also focus on what we like to work on then just working to earn money. 

This article is written with the ideas shared with 

Jinendra jain, Holistic healer

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