Luke Coutinho makes getting healthy easy enough to do in your sleep. Chew more to prevent acidity, for instance. Who knew? Try water fast to age slower. Or clear two hours of sleep debt with 20 minutes of a practice called yoga nidra. His habit swaps are tactical, simple and fresh.
And he has a massive list of 62 of these (habits) that you can browse through in his book The Magic Weight-Loss Pill in collaboration with actor and former yoga instructor Anushka Shetty, which came out recently. We catch hold of Coutinho to know more.
Excerpts from the interview:
Give us a quick tour around the chapters of your new book in collaboration with Anushka Shetty.
The book starts with a bit of mine and Anushka’s individual journeys as to how we discovered that lifestyle changes are the way forward with regards to health and well-being.
There are two parts to the book – part one talks on breaking down lifestyle into four pillars that I always emphasise on, namely Balanced Nutrition, Adequate Exercise, Sleep and Recovery and Emotional Detoxification.
Part two talks about the top 62 lifestyle changes that we have observed in our practice that has helped people lose weight and keep it off.
You’ve said in the past that one cannot divorce physical health from emotional health. Can you share emotional patterns that are common to people with conditions like cancer, diabetes, and hypertension?
When we spend time diagnosing and reflecting back into the lifestyles of people who have cancer, diabetes, hypertension, autoimmune disease, we find emotional stress as one commonality amongst 90 per cent of these cases.
Whenever we delve deeper into their lives and go six months back or the time when they first diagnosed the issue, we find that each of them did have some kind of stress or emotional downfall in their lives.
Whatever the cause of this emotional distress is – ranging from loss of a loved one, financial stress, relationship issues, bullying and so on – it all manifests into the physical body in some or the other way.
This is precisely why we spend a lot of time diagnosing before even planning their line of treatment.
If emotions and physical health have such a symbiotic dynamic, we have to wonder – is there a cure to heartache?
Everyone’s cause of heartache is different so their way of healing may also differ from person to person, but what’s most important is to feel the emotion. Emotion, be it positive or negative is real and we are allowed to feel them.
The more I see cases of heartaches, the more I see people trying to be good and suppress their real feelings because that’s what the spiritual and meditation books teach us. Too many of us want quick fixes and immediate results or else we give up and continue to be locked in a vicious cycle or never healing or dealing with our emotions.
And the more we use coping mechanisms like socialising, shopping, alcohol, drugs, extreme spiritual parts – the harder the journey gets.
So firstly, allow yourself to feel it, run it out of your system by feeling and riding the emotion completely. We have to allow emotions to be felt and expressed in a civilised way. The reason you may be hurt and suffering is because of your loss of love or mean things that were said to you.
So, if you are hurt but are trying to show the world that you are okay then you will never feel better. Yes, spirituality, meditation prayer, etc, helps us find inner strength to accept, let go, know us better, live more mindfully.
That’s a journey and continuous process- but in the meantime if you feel the need to truly feel your negative emotions – please feel it, express it and know that you are allowed to do so. Side-by-side, you can always start your journey to self-healing and get better.