Hi everyone, today I will talk to you about one of my favorite book that I read in 2018: ‘Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life” by Dr Suhas Kshirsagar.

Have you ever felt like you were doing the right things like eating healthy, exercising and still felt like you were out of balance or not feeling great or not loosing weight for example? That is a normal thing if you don’t do things at the right time! This book is amazing because it tells you what you are doing wrong and explains you how to connect deeper to your body with the circadian medicine. We have been thinking about how arranging our life according to the system (school, work, hobbies…) that we forgot how our bodies actually work and at what time! Yes, even the body has an internal clock!

First, I will tell you a bit about the author who is an amazing figure of Ayurveda, the traditional system of medicine of India. Second, I will tell you my impressions while reading the book and my 3 key-takeaways. And finally, I will tell you more about how to implement it easily and quickly in your lifestyle.

 

Who is Dr Suhas Kshirsagar?

Suhas Kshirsagar, is a world-renowned Ayurvedic physician and educator from India. He is directing an Ayurvedic Healing and Integrative Wellness Clinic in California, and the author of The Hot Belly Diet. He holds a B.A. in Ayurvedic medicine and completed a three-year residency as an M.D. (doctorate in Ayurvedic internal medicine) with a gold medal at the prestigious Pune University. He is a consultant at the Chopra Center; hold by the famous Deepak Chopra.

Impressions and key takeaways from ‘Change Your Schedule, Change Your Life”

While reading, I felt like everything was just…completely logic! Then the question is: why aren’t we doing it? If we think about it, we know that exercising at night isn’t a good thing. We are tired of the day. So why push our body more? It is the same thing for breakfast. We know we should eat one but we don’t do it because: no time or nothing in the fridge or not hungry (I’m guilty for that one too since ages). But in reality, we are not hungry because we usually eat too late so our bodies don’t really need to break-the-fast.

It’s actually only good reasons to change our lifestyle according to our bodies.

In this book, everything is explained thanks to the circadian rhythm. What is it? It means that everything in life is linked! Animals, plants, humans, bacteria, we all have a 24h clock within us. We live according to our chronobiology (seasons, hours of the day…). Although circadian rhythms are “built-in”, they adjust themselves to the local environment by external cues including light, temperature… But in our modern societies, we tend to forget more and more about them! We eat when the boss is telling us when we can eat. We go to the toilet when we can…

This book is all about taking your life back and come back to the basics as much as “normal life” allows us too. I promised myself to read it once a year to be sure I don’t forget to live according to my body and its most basic needs. While reading it again this year, I started to apply few rules that I learned.

My 3 takeaways:

• Exercise before breakfast: more efficient for fat loss, you have more energy and you gain more energy for your day
• Eat breakfast before 8am: eat something truly nourishing your body and preferably warm, body temperature so it is easy for your body to digest it
• Eat dinner between 5pm and 7pm: it should be the smallest meal of the day as our stomach is stopping slowly the machine. At 8pm, our stomach starts to sleep so everything you eat after potentially prepares you for a bad night sleep.

 

How to implement them easily and quickly in your lifestyle?

I figured that waking up early is the best chance I have to kick off the day on the right foot. I have this impression of having more time for myself (doing yoga, meditating, reading, journaling…) and funnily everything folds into place. When you wake up early, it means you went to bed earlier, so you are also hungry earlier than usual. Then, the other meals come naturally earlier than usual.

The hardest thing is when you have a night out. While reading Melissa Ambrosini’s book: ‘Mastering Your Mean Girl’ (best book ever! I’m preparing an article too on that book), she said something that really anchored in my mind. She says that she is going to bed around 8pm and when she is having people coming at her place or seeing other people in general, she sees them in the afternoon. And I thought that was amazingly planned because if we followed our circadian rhythm, we should naturally go to bed when the sun sets and wake up when the sun rises. But easier said than done. I was naturally more drowned to go to bed earlier while leaving in Australia because my friends were living with the sun too, like Australian people. But in France, it began more difficult to apply because all my friends finish work around 7 or 8 already! So I was exposed to 2 different options: eat before seeing them (which I felt was not really nice) or eat at the same time as them at a restaurant or at home.

I chose the second option while still not eating much and to organize not more than twice a week this kind of reunions to try to get some balance.

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And you how are you organizing your life to live more connected to your body? Do you have any tips to make you feel better? And tips to how to deal with your relatives to implement a healthier lifestyle without all your routines falling down?

If you want more information about what has been said, feel free to check them out and even tell me in the comments if you read other articles that were related to what we talked about!

 

Learn more about the author on his website: http://drsuhas.com/

Learn more about circadian rhythms: https://www.nigms.nih.gov/education/pages/Factsheet_CircadianRhythms.aspx

Other reasons to exercise before breakfast: https://exerciseiq.com.au/seven-reasons-for-exercise-before-breakfast/

And if you want to know more about the books of my Yogi Journey, head here!