Ayurveda Retreats - Lose Weight and Feel Good!

- Hey, see there, isn’t that Emily over there?
- Yes, wow, she lost a lot of weight! And how her skin is shining! Don’t you think she looks great?
- I heard she was out of town for four weeks, I bet she had a liposuction and some cosmetic surgery done!

Well…no! The truth is, Emily just came back from a four-week Ayurveda Retreat in India including daily oil massages, Panchakarma treatments, some yoga exercise and a personalized Ayurvedic diet. Emily lost the pounds she wanted to lose, her acne problem has been reduced to zero and her skin, hair and nails have never been this healthy before. In a nutshell: she feels great!
This all is not the result of surgical intervention and it is also not the result of four weeks of hunger and abjuring anything that delights the tongue! She did not stay away from any kind of sugar and she filled her stomach with delicious foods twice a day. So how did she do it?

The general misconception is that you need to suffer to be thin and have a great figure. You don’t. You just need to get to know your body, get to know what it needs and what it wants and you have to learn to listen to it. Ayurveda offers you a great way to do all of this with much joy and fun. Of course you can try to learn Ayurveda from books by reading everything about the doshas, the three body types and you can find Ayurvedic Cooking recipes on the internet but if you would like to have a real-life experience with the confidence that someone is taking care of you, that you are doing right for your body and if you would like to have someone giving you personal advice, individually for you, I would strongly recommend taking some time off and going to India for a Ayurveda Retreat in its country of origin.

The benefits of this are far-reaching. First of all you will have a safe environment in your retreat centre or Ashram where you can just enjoy all the benefits of your Ayurvedic treatments without having to worry about your housework, your office work, your family and all the other small things that distract the mind in your usual environment.

An experienced Ayurvedic doctor can determine your body type after a short examination and you will get to know whether your body produces more kapha, vata or pita, whether you have too much fire, air or mucus. With this information the kitchen prepares vegetarian food which suits exactly you and your body type. If you are having issues with too much air, the dishes will be air-reducing. If you have too much fire, the food will cool you down and vice versa. In this way your body gets what he needs in a very natural way, without any chemical dietary supplements, without any pills to pop.

Your body might need some time to adjust to the fact that it now gets exactly what it is longing for but after some days you can already notice the change. You feel more energetic, your body burns the food properly and converts it into energy that you can use, your body does not keep any fat in store for bad times because it is well-nourished and it burns the old fat cells right off. And yes, it is something that you don’t only do in the time of your retreat, you can integrate this nutrition in your daily life and keep your body healthy naturally and prevent it from accumulating unnecessary fat.

Nutrition however is not the only advantage of such a retreat! Your body has to get rid of all the toxins that it accumulated in the years that you fed it with the opposite of what it needed and wanted - be it too much fat, too much sugar or too hot food. In this process the Panchakarma treatments will work wonders! Panchakarma is a treatment split into five separate purifying actions which remove all the waste and toxins from your body and make a full cleanse-through of your digestive system. Of course these actions, too, is supervised by an Ayurvedic doctor and performed by Ayurvedic therapists.
Some yoga classes, be it yoga for weight loss, yoga for stress reduction or focused on another topic, will additionally help you to strengthen the body, to reduce some weight in the areas that you would like to, to relax after a busy day and to get to know the possibilities of your body.

The extra goody at the end: daily oil massages support the cleansing of the body, help your body to get rid of extra fat cells, peels dead cells off your skin and nourish the whole entity of your body from head to toe.
To summarize the benefits of an Ayurvedic retreat you can say simply: you lose weight, you nourish your body healthily, you cleanse it from everything unnecessary and you relax in a way that you have never relaxed before.

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