the body needing health maintenance and should not be suppressed. They help us to "soldier on" when we should really be in bed, taking a rest or on proper substances which will help cure the illness and then taking steps more likely to prevent it next time. Years of taking such drugs lowers our standards of what good health should feel like. We become attuned to average health.
   But good health surely means much more than feeling OK or average. True health should emit a vibrancy of life, a sense of all over well-being, an equilibrium of mind and body. According to the principles of yoga, the energies within the body, the energies within the mind and the interplay between the energies of the body and the mind must be better balanced for better health to be attained. It all relates to the quantity, quality and expression of what is called prana or life force.
   We often reminisce that as a child, we were closest to perfect health than at any time later. We use a child's energy as a measure of what it is like to be healthy and happy most of the time. The natural acts of running and playing, exploring and learning, added with lots of sleep and not too much food, give children the greatest joy of life before the age when schooling and the stresses of puberty begin. Their quantity and utilisation of prana is high - their inspiration operates at its peak. But what happens as we age? In short, that life force, that prana, becomes repressed, poorly directed, unfocussed, wasted on silly projects, sucked out of us by other greedy people, blocked in the body by over-eating and under exercising, blocked in the mind by uninspiring and dead end jobs as well as many more reasons. By taking an example from children, it would follow that adults should aspire to similar expressions of unimpeded life energy. As a child, life is simple, and health and happiness seem to follow from that. Simplifying life is a remedy for stress and illness. Getting enough sleep is a necessary ingredient for well being of body and mind. Creativity and learning is necessary for health of the spirit. Have you noticed the way young children usually want and need far less quantity of food than we force feed them, and yet they have so much energy! Their needs in food are much simpler since their metabolism is newer and more efficient and since they haven't yet learned to suppress their feelings with food.
   These days, medical statistics as well as many people's own observations, indicate that the "average health" of the "average person" (whatever that is!) is steadily in decline(53). It may not yet have been proven, but commonsense

would indicate that such ill health will be passed on to subsequent generations - both genetically and via lifestyle conditioning.
   As we grow through the complexities of puberty, adolescence and adulthood, it is obvious, that in most people, the life force starts to wane. One particular belief which only helps to reinforce this is that women reach their peak of physical health at 35, and men at 28. But this is only relevant to certain sporting frameworks. Such a myth just sends people approaching those ages into an early mid-life crisis and gives good fuel to "fitness despondency" with comments such as - "Oh I'm past that now". These sorts of mindsets limit our own opportunities for self improvement and change as we get older.
   However, degeneration after a particular age need not be the case. Is it possible that we can still maintain the simplistic joys of a child whilst still living and working within the complexities of a modern adult life? There is ample evidence of people who have adopted sensible and balanced lifestyles from the beginning, who have thrived in health for many years beyond the expected "prime years".
   There are also plenty of cases of people who have turned their health around from a downward spiral into a new lease of life, by simply adopting a better regime of exercise and eating. Even for an elderly person, it is possible to maintain youth-full-ness long after the wrinkles have come! Sure, for a person with chronic illnesses, that experience of full well-being may seem a long way off but that's no reason not to at least make a start and try to improve by whatever measure you are able.
   The path to recovery and better health is not such a long or hard one if we embrace methods of health restoration which work on all levels of our being, that is, our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual personality as well as our .
   This is the holistic approach to health which yoga takes, and food is only one small but very important part of that.

	~ Illness, Disease and Food as Medicine ~

   The body is an incredibly complex network of different interconnected systems and bio-feedback mechanisms, all of which must communicate properly with each other to do the best job. The digestive system, reproductive system, muscular-skeletal system, circulatory system, respiratory system, nervous