The best remedy is coconut oil gargling. Do this twice a day, in the morning after brushing and at night before sleeping but after at least two hours after eating dinner. Take a large tablespoon full of coconut oil (about 15 to 20 ml) into your mouth and gargle it vigorously for at least ten minutes. Do not brush or eat anything after doing this for at least half hour. Drinking warm water is ok.
The above practice would give you instant relief from bad breath but it may not be sustained long unless you understand the root cause for it and make subtle changes in your lifestyle to incorporate some new habits into your daily routine. The following articles would help.
Learning and practicing what to drink, when to drink and how to drink is the foremost.
Awareness Journey · November 17, 2022
Water can become an elixir for everlasting health and well-being. Self-care series Part 3: One interpretation of the meaning of the Sanskrit word Amrit (the nectar of immortality) is – The right procedure to drink water – “Am” = General or Common or correct and “Rit” = way or procedure or ritual. I learnt to convert this simple ever present water into my elixir for everlasting health in 2015 when I first heard a talk by Dr. Hiten Patel on water therapy. I have since, deeply studied this subject and also practiced it with myself and many people around me to experience amazing, almost miraculous health benefits. The first thing to understand is that pure water is just simple natural filtered water and not any drink made out of water. Adding sugar or lemon or chlorine or any other taste giving substance takes away the benefits that plain water can provide, namely hydrating our body and flushing out waste from our bodies. Our taste buds are the triggers for the body to begin secreting various digestive enzymes in preparation to digest a meal. Every time you drink something other than water (coke, coffee, tea, fruit juice) the digestive process starts – again and again – putting the entire digestive system into overdrive. Just pure water does not do this and simply allows the digestive system to rest and the body to hydrate and cleanse. If you are living in nature, a mountain spring water would be the perfect elixir. However in our urban environment it is important to understand the type of water our body needs. Water needs to be filtered, clear and very slightly pH alkaline not acidic (chlorinated water becomes acidic). It also needs to retain the natural trace dissolved minerals and not be hundred percent distilled pure water. If you have a good RO water purifier, adding just a grain of rock salt to a litre of water may be enough. The subject of acidic / alkaline water will be dealt with in another article, you may explore and find out more to know how to make the water you drink more suitable for your body’s needs. The temperature of water you drink is also very important. The best temperature would be to drink water at body temperature, which will make it tepid or seem mildly lukewarm. Refrigerated or iced water or very hot water is not helpful as the body goes into a limbic shock to deal with consumption of too cold or too hot things. What gives you a seemingly energetic boost when you drink something too cold or hot is the hormones secreted by your body as a result of limbic response and not the drink itself and it eventually takes a toll. Knowing when to drink water and how much to drink makes the difference between healthy body and disease. There are two functions that water does, one is to flush out or cleanse the digestive track and the other is to hydrate the body and flush out the toxins in a cellular level. The digestive track and especially the colon which is the last part of it, is a tube with lot of bends. It needs to be flushed and cleared out every morning as otherwise the colon always remains clogged causing innumerable gastric and other lifestyle disease that has now become a part of normal, sedentary urban life. Begin your morning drinking a large quantity of tepid water to be consumed immediately upon waking up. The quantity can very between three fourth of a litre to one and half litre depending of your size. For at least an hour after this, do not eat or drink anything and just allow the water to do its function of flushing the entire digestive track. The rest of your water consumption throughout the day is for hydrating your body. You can sip plain room temperature water at any time during the day except around your meal time. Eating food and drinking water are two incompatibly different things and should never be done together. The stomach secretes some hydrochloric acid and other digestive enzymes that is needed in the process of digesting the food you eat. This acid gets diluted when you drink water just before or during or just after eating a meal. Stop drinking water 30 minutes before your meal. Do not drink water during the meal. Begin drinking warm water one hour after the meal. Drink half a litre to one litre water in between two meals. You may be used to drinking some cold drink along with food and this seriously interferes with healthy digestion and absorption of nutrients from the digested food causing disease. This is explained in more detail in the next article about food. To summarise, following the procedure outlined below with respect to your water consumption will result in almost unbelievable feeling of wellness and good health. Just test it on yourself for fifteen days and you would be pleasantly surprised, your body will be happy. 1. Drink only plain filtered water, room temperature or tepid. 2. Begin the day with drinking 0.75 to 1.5 litre of water. 3. Stop drinking water 30 minutes before eating anything. 4. Do not drink water or any other drink during your meal. 5. Do not drink water up to one hour after your meal. 6. Treat all other drinks as food and only pure water as your hydrating drink. 7. Drink 0.5 to 1 litre water in between each of your meal. 8. Your total plain water consumption during the day would be between 2.5 to 4 litres. Go about changing your habit around drinking water gently and gradually. Especially the morning flushing practice. If you have no habit of drinking water in the morning, start with one or two glasses and gradually increase it. Reach out to selvansmentoring for help in cultivating healthy habits for a lifetime. The self care series will be of five parts namely: 1. What is wholesome sleep? 2. How to enjoy wholesome sleep? 3. Water can become the elixir for everlasting health and well-being. 4. What is healthy mindful eating. 5. What is mindful wholesome physical activity.
Maintaining an alkaline body pH is also very important not only to avoid bad breath but also for overall health and wellbeing.
Awareness Journey · October 6, 2022
Circadian Rhythm – The Body’s biological clock. The daily sunrise and sunset, the Lunar cycles, the annual climatic cycles, the planetary movements, everything in our universe has a set rhythm and a set cyclic pattern. Our bodies are also a product of this nature and it has a pattern – a daily pattern, a monthly pattern, an annual pattern and also a lifelong cyclic pattern. When we align our daily habits around sleeping, eating, drinking, physical activity as well as mental activity in tune with this natural cyclic pattern we tend to be in a balance and flow, which is conducive to a wholesome experience of life and health. Conversely when our daily routines become random or misaligned with our biological clock we become restless, imbalanced and loose the ease of flow, getting into dis-ease. The various physical organs and functions of our body are aligned with twelve energy meridians. These meridians are – 1. The Large Intestine meridian, 2. Stomach meridian, 3. Spleen meridian, 4. Heart meridian, 5. Small Intestine meridian, 6. Bladder meridian, 7. Kidney Meridian, 8. Circulation sex meridian (pericardium), 9. Triple warmer (adrenal) meridian, 10. Gall Bladder meridian, 11. Liver meridian and 12. Lung meridian. The natural energies flow is dominant through each of these meridians like clock work starting from around sunrise, for about two hours in each through the 24 hours of the day. Therefore certain activities like the heaviest meal of the day, the time of intensive physical exercise, nighttime sleep, daytime nap, intellectual or stressful activity, sexual activity, clearing of bowels, etc happen in a perfect flow only when engaged during certain times of the day. Note: This is an image from wikipedia, you can read the entire article about circadian rhythm here in case you want to know more about it. The circadian rhythm gets upset with some activities such as: (1) International travel across timezones, (2) Working night shifts, (3) Random irregular eating habits, (4) Stress, overthinking, worry or anxiety throughout the day, (4) Random irregular sleep times or insufficient sleep, (5) Strenuous physical activity during the low body temperature cycle times. When the circadian rhythm remains upset for prolonged periods of time it could result in lower immunity, illness or longterm chronic disease. The body is quite flexible and adaptive to changes in habitual timings but the new habit needs to be regular. You can easily reset your circadian rhythm by having a fixed time for going to sleep and waking up. Except that it is impossible to have a perfectly balanced circadian rhythm as long as you are working night shifts or irregular shifts. In those unavoidable conditions you can still learn certain healthy coping mechanisms to reduce occurrence of illness or disease. How to find out if your circadian rhythm is upset and needs to be reset? Some of the ways that your body tells you about this imbalance are – frequent headaches, long term mild headache or heaviness, feeling lethargic upon waking up from sleep, feeling sleepy throughout the day, feeling uneasy or uncomfortable all the time, low resistance to infections, feeling irritable, restless or morose most of the time, etc. Your body is more likely to experience peak fitness and health when you have a daily routine of going to sleep around 10 pm, sleeping for 7 to 8 hours, eating your largest meal of the day around noon, engaging in stressful or intellectual efforts during mid day and strenuous physical activity around early evening. An hour or two variance from this ideal timing is ok and each person may find a slightly different routine more suited. When your actual routine is irregular or totally in variance to the ideal one due to unavoidable circumstances, you can offset the effects to some extent by adopting some practices that would keep your body pH neutral or alkaline instead of acidic. In addition to this, a regular habit of sitting to meditate and doing energy movements to ease the flow of energies in your body will greatly help. In contrast quick fix coping mechanisms such as caffeine, sugar, or similar energy boosting substances may give a temporary relief but result in much damage in the long term.
Treating the physical body alone is not enough. Learn to adequately rest your mind is also important for holistic health.
Selvan Srinivasan · 1y
Are you mentally tired or not?
I think the question probably is – “Are you always mentally tired or not?” I used to be always mentally tired probably for almost twenty years up until five years ago. And I realise that it was mental exhaustion only now after learning to rest my mind and going through an unbelievable life transformation as a result of that. When we are professionally engaged with our work, our mind is busy with mental activity which includes planning, working, calculating, computing, watching something (videos) listening to something (such as podcasts), reading, studying, focusing, concentrating, paying attention, etc. When we relax from doing any of the above work, we take rest by keeping our mind busy with other mental activity. These include the monologues in our mind with ourselves, the dialogues we carry out mentally with an imaginary person, the voices of others in our mind telling us what not to do, memories of past events, worries about the future, fantasising, imagining, dreaming, etc. We are habituated to this and so it seems to be happening effortlessly and automatically, although we are doing it. We don’t know how to stop it. This leads to mental tiredness and eventually to perennial mental exhaustion. Sleep doesn’t seem to rest our mind completely probably because we continue our mental activity in the form of restless dreams. In my opinion, based on my personal life experience of completely healing myself and several others from supposedly incurable illness, mental exhaustion is the root cause for all the chronic lifestyle disease afflicting humanity in modern times. I have written extensively about how to find out if we are mentally tired and how to completely rest our mind to allow our bodies to heal holistically. You can find all these information and free tools such as videos for physical movements and audios for guided meditation in my website to help release the mental restlessness and enjoy wholesome rest. This will help you experience active, energetic life all the time instead of feeling tired all the time.