Norma Kamali - I am Invincible

I DEDICATE THIS BOOK TO MY MOTHER...

SHE SEEMED ECCENTRIC, AND TIRELESS, IN HER COMMITMENT TO CREATIVITY; SHE PRACTICED A HEALTHY LIFESTYLE IN WAYS NO ONE ELSE UNDERSTOOD, AND STELLA WAS SURE THAT ANYTHING WAS POSSIBLE.

I HAVE BECOME HER.

WHEN I FEEL EMPOWERED AND WHEN I AM HEALTHY I AM STRONG AND THEN I CAN DO ALL THE THINGS I NEED TO DO TO REACH THE GOALS I NEED TO REACH IN ORDER TO FULFILL MY BIG DREAMS THAT ARE AS BIG AS THE WORLD AND AS OPTIMISTIC AS MY MIND CAN IMAGINE I WILL AGE WITH POWER AND INFLUENCE CHANGE BECAUSE I KNOW MY PURPOSE

This is my personal mantra and has been for as long as I can remember.

This book started out as a gift to a friend on her fiftieth birthday. A group of women were having a party for her, and all the gifts were meant to address the fifty-year mark in some way. I gave her a small leather-bound Moleskine notebook with my 50 Tips on Turning 50! I was amazed at the reaction. I received texts, emails, and follow-up calls from many of the guests, asking me to make my book available. So here we are! That original book evolved and now is written for all women at every stage of their lives. This is my gift to you. Sleep, diet, and exercise are my Three Pillars. This is the healthy lifestyle you will see referenced in these pages over and over again. Together, these pillars energize and restore body and mind.

Each decade in a womans life teaches and informs her ability to reach her potential. This is achieved through building self-esteem, recognizing and celebrating the authentic self, and living with purpose. I believe embracing a healthy lifestylewhich may entail rethinking lifetime habitsis key to how you look and feel. I began my career more than fifty years ago, and I still ride lifes ups and downs. I was married at nineteen and divorced by twenty-nine. With ninety-eight dollars to my name, I left my husband and the business we created together behind, but I kept my soul. I never believed myself to be a businessperson, but surprisingly, I feel comfortable in the role. I work out every day. I have been meditating since 1970. I met my soul mate when I was sixty-five. I use my Scrabble app as an escape, and if there is a dance party, I am there. I believe the more you do, the more you can do. Five decades of failures and successes give me mountains of experience to impart. The way I have learned to live my life is proving ever more important to me now, as I finish writing this book during a worrisome time of uncertainty and unprecedented change. I am leaning on the good habits I have made in order to stay healthy and fortify my immune system, and am finding creative ways to pivot in order to adapt my business, quickly solve problems, look for the bright side, rise to the challenges, meaningfully connect with people, and keep living my purpose.

In this book are the practices I have researched and developed over many years, aided by the wisdom and insight from respected experts and pioneering industry leaders I have been fortunate to meet. This is what works for me, and I hope it will be helpful to you, too. If you have questions about how to incorporate certain advice or methodologies into your own life, consult with a doctor, nutritionist, trainer, or other healthcare professional about designing a plan that works best for you.

I am grateful for all I have learned and for what I am able to pass along to you. I am honored to share the professional and personal transitions I have made, the research I have done, and my ideas about how to move through the decades and age with power!

NORMA KAMALI

My thoughts about lifestyle are really simple: If you can control the quality of your life, why not do it? You can design your lifestyle to create the outcome you desire. NORMALIFE is my philosophy for living. It is built around the Three Pillarssleep, diet, exerciseand the simple things everyone can do to maintain balance, happiness, and good health. For me, it is a state of mind. It is about making deliberate choices that become ingrained good habits, all of which make it easier to stay on track and to defuse difficult situations that otherwise might set one back. These are the things that work for me; I hope they will work for you, too.

A healthy lifestyle is an achievable concept. It may require some effort, some planning, and at times some willpower, but it doesnt have a price tag and it is not exclusive. Exercise is free. Singing, dancing, and laughing are free. Meditation is free, and so is sleep.

My early introduction to health and well-being was memorable and is still quite vivid.

When I was a kid, my mother (who lived from 1915 to 2002) would start juicing at six oclock each morning. We lived in the smallest apartment in New York City, which shed made even smaller by separating spaces so my brother and I had our own bedrooms. My space was two feet away from the vibrating steel juicer, which, by the way, was the size of a car engine and sounded as loud. She had supplements all over the house and herbs growing on every windowsill. From these shelves packed with greens, shed snip mint leaves for tea and parsley for stomachaches, and incorporate all of them into our meals as flavorful ingredients. She gave us oil of oregano when we were sick and used olive oil for absolutely everything. This was the fifties, and my mother was what folks might have labeled eccentric at the time for practicing these alternative approaches to wellness. Literally no one elses mom was doing anything like this, and I would think to myself, What is she doing?

Now I am so grateful for her influence. Through my mothers approach to life, I learned the concept of timelessness: What works through the ages always works. I am very much aware of how timelessness is a dominant theme in everything I do, from the designs I create to the ingredients I source.

My commitment to learning more about a healthy lifestyle as an adult was motivated by the loss of my very dear friends to AIDS in the 1980s. How could I lose my two best friends in such a short period of time?

Gone!

The explanation for these countless deaths was that the immune system could no longer protect the body once it became compromised. I sought out information (no Google then; real research, old-school!), and in time I found pockets of knowledge in California, New Mexico, and Arizona. Work was being done rethinking the health and wellness status quo, and alternative practices for building a strong immune system were being developed. I changed how I was living and never looked back.

Ive learned that the mindbody connection is a powerful source of well-being. We have the ability to create positive outcomes with an assortment of grounding practices. I find meditation and breathwork particularly effective for balance and stress release. When you use breath, you can manifest physical endurance and strength andas in childbirth, for examplesummon the ability to move beyond pain. Meditation is so helpful to me that in my fantasy it should be required for all Americans at a prescribed time daily. I was so pleased when my staff expressed an interest in meditation. Now, every day at twelve-thirty P.M. , we close the company for a thirty-minute break. Some of my team sits yogi-style, some sit in a chair, some lie on mats, and sometimes theres snoring, and all of the above is okay.