AmalIn the preface I wrote about the moustache. When the moustache my son Alvin used to catch hold of and play with fell away, I thought it was a skin problem. The skin doctor gave an injection; that drove the sugar up. The family doctor gave medicine for the sugar; that unsettled something else. Both were good doctors. But neither of them saw me as a whole person — one looked at my skin, the other looked at my blood.
What I learned in those two years is this: the only person who can see my body whole is myself. This book is an attempt to learn that way of seeing.
Eleven chapters, more than seventy tables, twenty-seven methods, thirty Puthukural, twelve teachers. It does not matter if you forget every one of them. This much is all that needs to remain:
- The body is a clock. It reads its own time by looking at the sun and the moon. Living against that rhythm is the first cause of today's illnesses.
- We do not control food; through food we control hormones. When matters more than how much.
- Illness is not an enemy. It is the body's own attempt to clean itself. Our work is to make room for it.
- Change is not an event but a cycle. One day missed is nothing at all; the next full moon arrives in thirty days.
- The mind is the body's climate. What you eat does not kill you; it is the thoughts that eat you that kill you.
I think that when an author finishes a book he should also state its limits.
I am not a doctor. I am not a nutritionist either. Only a patient who went looking for the root of an illness. What is in this book I have tested on my own body for more than ten years. Your body is different. Your heredity is different, and your work, and your season, and the weight on your mind. So the method that is right is one you must build for yourself.
Nor is science fixed. What is believed right today may change tomorrow. The books and studies I have cited are the best knowledge of their own time; they are not the final truth. So read this book not as a scripture but as a notebook.
There is a danger, too, in simplifying. I have shut hormones into tables and compressed illness into a single phrase, "loss of balance". The body is in truth far more complicated than this. Do not take the shortening I did for the sake of understanding as knowledge for treatment.
Things I still have no answer to
- Why does the same way of eating help one person and not another?
- At what point does strain on the mind turn into illness?
- How much of the benefit of fasting is real and how much is belief? — all that is clear is that both of them work in the body.
- My brother's brain haemorrhage, my father's cancer — could any other way of living have prevented them?
- In this age of artificial intelligence, will it soon be possible to know a person's work, habits and mental load and to get medical help suited to every illness in their body?
I think it is only honest to write these questions down rather than cover them over.
Thanks
The lines of those ten Puthukural in Chapter 9 — what my father and mother lived out without ever studying medicine — are the seeds of everything here.
To my brother and my father: their sudden deaths pushed me into this search. Without that loss there would be no book.
To my wife Jacqueline, who was a laboratory mouse along with me for four years.
To the twelve teachers in Chapter 10 of this book — some I met in person, some I met only through their books. Nothing in this is my own; only the gathering of it is mine.
To you
If you read this book as a book of information and close it, that is failure. If you change even one day, that is success.
Tomorrow morning, a tumbler of warm water. A twenty-minute walk. Sleep before ten at night. That is the whole of the first step. There is no need to begin all twenty-seven methods tomorrow.
On the next full moon, if you wish, begin a cycle. If you slip, stop. The next full moon comes in thirty days.
Write to me about what you find. It will have a place in the next edition, or in a further volume. The page of success stories in Chapter 11 of this book is nearly empty at present. You are the ones who must fill it.
Last of all, speak to your doctor before you begin this. Your body is your own; the plan is mine. Let us both learn and grow well.
Food, work, truth, sleepwill do the body good
This line my father said holds the whole of this book. All the rest is only explanation.
The moon will not wait for you.
Nor will time.
The day you begin
is a good day, a healthy day.
This is Nila Nalam.
Awareness, rhythm, cycle.
With thanks, and my regards,
Amalorpavanathan Yagulasamy
South Carolina, USA
02 October 2026