Last night I had a yoga class. This morning I did sun salutations. It's an amazing practice. During yoga we had a short discussion about holistic medicine vs. western medicine which treats disease and focuses on one aspect without taking into consideration the whole person.

The example was a study of Vitamin D. It said that children born in September tended to have stronger bones because their mothers often had more natural vitamin d having gone through summer and gotten vitamin D from the sun. This makes sense, unless you use sunscreen which then blocks the vitamin D. The holistic approach would be to make sure that everybody has a way of achieving the benefits of the sun no matter what time of year. The western way would be to recommend supplementation of the diet with vitamin D for everybody across the board although some might not necessarily need it. And to use sunscreen to block the sun's rays and then add artificial vitamin D.

I'm all about the holistic approach. I believe all systems of the body work in coordination with the others and that all elements of the person, mind, body and spirit also work with each other and to maintain a balance of these aspects of a person, if we are working to fix something, everything must be considered.

I consider weight loss to be a perfect example of where the focus is on one thing, the body. But a person who is out of balance in one area is also likely out of balance in another. I know that most people who are feeling the emotional results of an unhealthy body need to focus on the emotional aspects at the same time they focus on the physical. Fixing the physical will not fix the emotional because often it's the other way around, the emotional aspect is the cause and the physical issues are a manifestation of spiritual and emotional imbalance.

So the fix is to allign yourself so that you are working on all of the aspects of you at the same time. I'm doing yoga for the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of the practice. I'm looking for a sport to participate in because my spirit enjoys physical play. I like to run for meditative reasons as well as physical. Everything is connected.

So to go into a weight loss program where the focus is almost entirely physical, eat less, move more(good advice yet they don't stand alone) is not likely to work. There needs to be a complete holistic approach that shifts the paradigm from working on a specific problem to working on the whole human.

Affirmation: I am a whole person. My body needs strengthening as does my mind and spirit. As I work on all three together I feel all things balancing and trust that the healthy coordination of all of the systems and aspects of me will be the best approach to my imbalanced eating.

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Namaste