Nardini - The 21-day yoga body : a metabolic makeover and life-styling manual to get you fit, fierce, and fabulous in just 3 weeks

Copyright 2013 by Sadie Nardini
Interior photographs copyright 2013 by Francis Holland

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nardini, Sadie, 1971
The 21 day yoga body : a metabolic makeover and life-styling manual to get you fit, fierce, and fabulous in just 3 weeks / Sadie Nardini.
pages cm
1. Yoga. I. Title.
RA781.67.N37 2013
613.7046dc23
2013012007

eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-34707-5
Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-0-385-34706-8

Book design by Elizabeth Rendfleisch
Interior photographs by Francis Holland
Cover design by Jessica Sayward Bright
Cover photography by Tyler McCoy
Video by Tyer McCoy

v3.1

To my family;
all the beautiful teachers and beings
who have loved me
and allowed me
to love them in return.
There is no greater joy than this.

Well, a yoga body is not an obsessive, superficial outer focus on your form only. Youre not a tortilla. Youre the whole enchilada, babyand were about to go loco on your old limiting habits.

A yoga body is freedom, freedom to be who you know youre meant to be, deep inside. Its 100-proof you, distilled to your essence on all levels, rocking your mind-bod-spirit-freakin-entire-life to a miraculous, turbo-boosted new level. Yeah, that good.

Im Sadie Nardini, and its lovely to meet you.

As youll soon find out, Ive re-created my entire life to be supernaturally amazing, and I want you to do this, too. But theres something I want you to know about meand your programfirst.

This is a book about cleaning house, lighting fires, and coming home to yourself.

Outcomes you may notice over the next three weeks are: weight loss (if needed), a toned body, the ability to deal better with drama and make clear decisions about your direction, and a new eating lifestyle. But the ultimate payoff is that youre about to raise your whole vibe, heal old wounds that keep you stuck, and begin to shine so brightly that your outer reality will shift to match the shape of your spirit.

The true lifeblood coursing through this program is something as old as timeand the only thing that will work if you want to effect real changes in your life. You have to learn to do you .

You may not know this yet, but you are a leader. And the direction in which you lead yourself is the way youll pull everyone and everything. Your life is only a GPS that orients to wherever you are: change your inner vibration and youll shift your thoughts, emotions, and actions. To become the leader of mind, body, heart, and expression that you were born to be, lets get you resonating higher so that who you truly are and who you want to be become a perfect, soul-mate matchmade not in heaven but right here on earth, today.

When it comes to food and exercise, the other components of a whole, hot, healthy Yoga Body, Im not asking you to spend your life at the gym, give up what makes you happy, snack on cardboard, or aim to look freakishly perfect. I wont force you to eat kamut flakes for the rest of your life. I enjoy a good steak. I require red wine to feel complete. I believe there is a role for what you love in a healing day-to-day diet. And lets flip the script on the word diet , shall we? Im sick of seeing people strip themselves of all body fatand energy, vitality, and happinessbecause theyve been sold a bill of goods by pictures in a magazine.

Besides, healthy is the new skinny. The Yoga Body wants to be fit, fierce, and fabulous, inside and out. And when it comes to the whyyour core purpose for doing anything newthink of this process less as doing something restrictive and more as doing something that gives you back everything thats really important. This is your chance to optimally fuel your vessel for greatness. After all, you have things to create, names to take, asses to kick. Youll need to be on full power to show up, every day, and create the miracles you seek.

Ive designed these twenty-one days to make this major shift happen and still be easy to fit into your busy modern life. Yet all of it is rooted, like a lotus into the mud, deep in ancient yoga principles that are known to get your mojo back, fast. Im here to translate for you, make it fun to be a badass, and invite you to break the cycle of playing small and, as my French artist friend puts it, get back to living all zee time huge.

This is the outcome: consciously creating your best-ever Yoga Body.

Like a boring ol monk who just took a vow of silence and has nothing even resembling fun. Kidding! More like a VIP, red-hot fabulous party! Case in point: As I write this, Im sitting on the deck of the River Caf, a floating restaurant on the East River in Brooklyn. My buddy Joe Delissio, author of the River Caf Wine Primer , set up a wine tasting for me and three of my girlfriends because, you knowwe have to do research on your behalf for this book.

We finish with sips of a Madeira wine from 1895. Oh, babyI just drank something that was created when Monet was still painting all his bridges and lilies. It tasted likehistory.

As Patric, the matre d, and I talk about how impossible it is to rank great food, love, and wine in order, I look around myself, at my sweet friends, Joe, at the piano, out at the Brooklyn Bridge, and the slowly rolling East River, and I think to myselfThis. Is. My. Life. Then I add, Of course it isyou created it to be this way!

Lest you think I have always lived a charmed life, as Patric would say, au contraire, mon frre. It used to be much, much different from this.

When I was thirteen, I contracted a severe spinal cord meningitistype illness, and it went untreated because the first diagnosis was that I had Stage IV leukemia. Yay. For several days, I thought I was going to die, until the lab realized they had put some extra zeros where they shouldnt be on my results.

The effects of the disease left me like a rag doll for two years; completely weak and unable to breathe properly, because my central nervous system was inflamed, I had five panic attacks a day on average. There was no effective treatment.

Out of desperation, my mom, Janet, aka the Black BeretIve very rarely seen her without it onpulled out Richard Hittlemans Yoga: 28 Day Exercise Plan . The lady on the cover was wearing a flesh-colored unitard. The Black Beret said, Maybe this could help you?

Dated fashions aside, the book saved my life. I was regularly considering ending it all and, along with it, my suffering. I had nothing to lose by hanging out in these funky poses, sometimes for hours. I couldnt even sit for long, but I sure could do the restorative poses, like lying on my back, legs up the wall, and I could breathe.

I found that the breathing techniques helped me calm my system, and I began to have fewer panic attacks. I felt a surge of hope: If I could change this one thing about myself what else was possible? And so, I began to fight.

It took me ten years to claw back up that hill into physical and mental health. But I did it, using only yoga, mindful eating, and stress-reduction techniques. I learned how to take actions that served my progress instead of retrograding me into a relapse or keeping me stuck.