Anuradha Sridharan

Most of us have this tendency to prefer sweet foods. This is partly due to evolution, partly due to conditioning and our exposure to sweet foods during our childhood. I'm a person with a sweet tooth as well🙂 Please note that I'm referring to "sweet tooth" in this post and not "sweet cravings". Both these terms are used interchangeably but they are different. I'll talk about the latter in a separate post. Let me share with you 7 strategies/tips that have helped me manage my sweet tooth. (1) First and foremost, it is better to acknowledge and accept our preferred tastes. There is nothing wrong or shameful about being a sweet-toothed person. (2) Once I understood my taste buds, I asked myself, "What are my most preferred sweet foods?". I prefer Indian sweets and desserts the most. So I decided to indulge in my most favorite sweet foods and avoid eating other forms of sweets that I'm not too fond of. I can easily say NO to chocolates, icecream...

I love to jot down thoughts and ideas. Earlier, I used to write them down in a digital note-taking product (Evernote to be precise). I then switched to a paper-based planner/journal sometime in June 2019. In this post, I want to share a particular journaling technique that I love. The inspiration for this technique came from two sources the amazing productivity bible - David Allen's Getting Things Done book - that I read sometime in 2006, but still relevant in today's digital times from Harry Potter series, Dumbledore's thought bowl - Pensieve This technique helps if you are someone who feels overwhelmed and being dragged by multiple responsibilities, inspired by new projects, initiatives and ideas, and whose thoughts jump across various spectrums/genres. Process: I prefer to follow this technique on most mornings (not every day though). Here's what I do: I sit with my journal and a pen. And I just jot down all thoughts that come one by one in a bullet format - no jud...

 There's a beautiful scene in the movie #Home where the psychologist talks to Oliver about how Antony is influenced by social media. Though some popular reviewers critiqued that scene to be lecture-ish, I just loved it.  We experience stress when our thoughts, words, and actions are not aligned. Social media influences our thoughts quite a bit. The more people we follow, the greater the effect of that influence. We follow several people, primarily for the sake of inspiration. We get newer ideas and inspirations almost daily. We bookmark some of the ideas for future reference. We try to implement some of the ideas right away - while we might be successful at a few of them, we might also end up not being able to incorporate some of those ideas in our daily lives. Irrespective of our actions (or inactions), a simple scroll-through of our feed impacts our thoughts in subconscious ways.  I've always been a strong advocate of this idea - "Don't follow any universal rule when...

 A few days back, K and I went for our weekly fruits and vegetable shopping. The bill is usually around Rs.1000. It has increased slightly in the past few weeks, given that more people are at home, but this is the average amount we incur every week.  Anyway, this post got triggered by two comments.  "You are buying too many fruits and vegetables for a week", a casual comment by a loved one. "Junk food is so cheap but fruits, vegetables, cold pressed oils and millets cost yaanai vilai", a comment from a dear reader. This is how I see it - "choose quality ingredients and invest towards your health NOW" or "save money by buying cheap, junk food and pay with a hefty interest towards medical expenses LATER". Having spent the last 3 months with multiple hospital visits for Appa, I got to experience the sheer magnitude of medical expenses, running in lakhs. To give you a rough idea, Doctor consultation - Rs.900 . This is for outpatients. If the same doc...

Guess the topic I have become extremely curious about. Astrology. Yes, you heard that right. Over the past three months, my interest in astrology has increased quite a bit. I was looking for answers related to events that have been unfolding in my life in the past one year or so - multiple challenges, unexpected turns of events, situations beyond my control, and so on. I wouldn't claim that I have got the answers I was looking for through astrology. But I could see a larger connection and correlation, something which helps me feel a sense of calm and acceptance. Since childhood, I have always been interested in reading Sun signs and the daily predictions - be it in a random newspaper or a magazine. But I never paid closer attention to them. But in the last few months, I have been listening to monthly predictions and watching multiple videos to understand astrology better. Instead of bluntly dismissing astrology as superstition/pseudoscience, I want to go deeper and learn the nuance...

 I vividly remember the chapters of my 12th grade Biology textbook. There were individual chapters on the various systems of our human body - digestive system, respiratory system, circulatory system, endocrine system etc. The chapters covered each system in detail and explained the various organs involved. But there weren't any mention of how each of these systems are interconnected and how they influence each other. To elaborate on this interconnectedness, let's take the example of digestive system. School textbooks talk about the different organs involved in digestion - esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, small intestine, large intestine and colon. They also talk about how carbohydrates, proteins and fats are broken down in various stages through the digestive enzymes present in saliva, stomach acids, role of bile etc.  From what I have observed and learned is that digestion is influenced by factors, apart from the organs of digestive system.  Good dental structure is ...

Many years back, I came across an interview by Superstar Rajnikanth in a Tamil magazine. He had recommended a couple of his favorite spiritual books - Autobiography of a Yogi (I'm yet to read it) and Living with the Himalayan masters. Being an ardent fan of Superstar, especially for his spiritual angle, I promptly bought these books and added them to my bookshelf. A book comes to you at the right time when you need it. Since this year, I have been picking up more books from the spiritual genre and Swami Rama's " Living with the Himalayan masters " caught my attention.  It is an interesting collection of anecdotes and life stories that Swami Rama experienced in his spiritual life in the Himalayas. A fascinating read, that covers a wide range of topics ranging from Karma, spiritual path, enlightenment, power of the mind, Yoga, universal connections, etc. Each chapter is dealt with independently and this helped me to read and absorb the book slowly. Though the underlying...