Knowing your body type is essential to understanding yourself. When you find out what is actually going on inside you, you will no longer be bound by society’s notions of what you should be doing, saying, thinking, and feeling.

The seeds of disease are sown early. It would be hard to find a heart patient in his 40s who had not shown some suspicious signs in his 20s. Even 10-year-olds will already be prone either to allergies or to being chronic overweight, having high cholesterol, or peptic ulcers. By understanding body types and their specific strengths and weaknesses, you can begin to take preventive steps when they do the most good, long before overt illness appears.

Body types make prevention more specific. There is not enough personal connection being made between prevention and the individual who needs it. If you try to prevent every disease without knowing your particular predisposition, you are stabbing in the dark.

Body types make treatment more accurate once a disease appears. Generalized treatment is a hit or miss affair; it assumes that a given disease is the same in all people. But this is not true. The Ayurvedic body type can pinpoint what is happening inside each individual.

Adapted from Perfect Health: The Complete Mind/Body Guide by Deepak Chopra, M.D. (Harmony Books, 1990).