Human Resilience | Free preview

Read a preview of the book

Selected pages from the 166-page August 2026 edition: the full table of contents, why Dr. Chand wrote the book, what the Terrain Model is, and the opening of the first foundation.

“The body often whispers before it screams.”

Table of contents

A practical path from awareness to action, restoration, and resilience.

Opening

1. Introduction — Why I Am Writing This Book Now
2. The Window of Opportunity — These Are Not Rare Problems
3. What Human Resilience Means
4. The Story Behind This Book
5. Dr. Chand’s Terrain Model
6. An Offering
7. My Health Journey
8. How I Got Hooked
9. Protect Your Judgment During Major Life Transitions
10. How to Use This Book
11. The Modern Terrain

The 19 foundations

1. Awareness — The First Foundation
2. Ahara — Plant-Based Functional Nutrition
3. Hydration — Water as a Foundation
4. Constipation & Complete Elimination
5. Gut Ecosystem — Colon to Cognition
6. Fasting & Meal Timing
7. Sleep & Nighttime Oxygenation
8. Stress, Rumination & Emotional Terrain
9. Visceral Fat, Insulin Resistance & Metabolic Awareness
10. Vascular Health — Blood Pressure, Arteries & Circulation
11. Immune Regulation & CPDII — Taming the Tiger
12. Movement, Muscle, Balance & Functional Reserve
13. Breathing, Yoga & Nervous-System Regulation
14. Sensory Health — Hearing, Vision, Smell, Taste & Balance
15. Minerals, Seeds & Food Diversity
16. Women’s Life-Course Terrain
17. Environment, Medication & Supplement Burden
18. Connection, Purpose, Service & the Home Terrain
19. Recovery, Brain Reserve & Human Resilience

Plus a special food note on Indian bitter melon (karela) and an integrated chapter on the connected cardiometabolic and vascular terrain.

Closing & practice

• The Whole Book in One Page
• A Message of Hope
• I Return What I Learned
• Ancient Wisdom, Modern Resilience
• What Matters Most — Foundations of a Resilient Life
• 10 Actions to Carry With You
• A Critical Window: Can We Preserve Brain Resilience?

Why I am writing this book now

Earlier awareness can change the direction of a life.

At age 54, I survived a major hemorrhagic stroke.

It forced me to confront a difficult truth: I had spent my professional life studying pharmacology and human biology, yet I had normalized important changes in my own body. The stroke was the alarm. The biological process had been developing quietly for years.

That lesson shapes this book. We are living longer, but added years do not automatically mean added years of clear thinking, mobility, independence, or quality of life.

Many common risks can overlap in the same person and build quietly over time: visceral fat, insulin resistance or diabetes, high blood pressure, atherosclerotic vascular disease, poor sleep or sleep apnea, inactivity, constipation, highly processed food patterns, chronic stress, and declining muscle or balance.

This book does not promise that dementia, stroke, heart disease, cancer, or aging can always be prevented. Genetics, biology, environment, access to care, chance, and many other factors matter. But earlier awareness may create a window to evaluate risk, strengthen daily foundations, and protect function before a crisis forces attention.

The purpose is not fear. It is earlier awareness.

If one reader notices an important pattern earlier, asks better questions, and takes constructive action before a major loss of function, this book has served its purpose.

What human resilience means

Human resilience is the capacity to adapt, recover, and continue participating in life with as much clarity, physical function, emotional steadiness, connection, purpose, independence, and dignity as circumstances allow. It does not mean that nothing goes wrong. It means that enough reserve remains to respond, restore, and keep going.

The promise is not immortality.

The promise is earlier awareness. The promise is better daily choices. The promise is preserving function, independence, dignity, and quality of life for as long as possible.

The stroke was the announcement, not the beginning

I had scientific knowledge. I did not yet have enough awareness of changes in my own body.

This book began long before I knew I was writing it. In 1973, when I came from India to Canada for graduate study in pharmacology, I was lean, active, and rarely worried about my health. My waist was about 29 inches. Modern life felt exciting: new foods, convenience, career, family, and opportunity.

Over the next twenty-five years, the changes were quiet. My waist grew. Stress and work demands increased. Sleep changed. Movement declined. I became comfortable with sweet drinks, fast foods, fried and highly processed foods, restaurant meals, and convenience foods. Dark urine, constipation, fatigue, and other signals became easy to normalize because I still felt functional.

I was trained in science. I understood pharmacology. Yet I did not fully understand what was happening inside my own body.

By my early fifties, my waist was near 37 inches. My children once joked that I looked pregnant. Their innocent observation saw something I had stopped seeing: my body had changed gradually enough that the new normal no longer felt abnormal.

Then, at age 54, I suffered a major stroke. The event was sudden; the biology behind it was not. No single cereal, creamer, meal, additive, or habit caused that stroke by itself. The more useful lesson is that years of interacting risks can accumulate: food pattern, visceral fat, blood pressure, vascular disease, sleep, hydration, inactivity, stress, genetics, and chance.

By the grace of God, I survived and gradually rebuilt function. Later vascular disease and concerns about memory gave me further awakenings. Decades later, I am still learning, teaching, moving, breathing, writing, and serving.

Dr. Chand’s Terrain Model

After I became the patient, I began to look at health differently. Resilience is not the work of one organ, one laboratory value or test result, one nutrient, one medication, one supplement, or one practice. It grows from many connected foundations.

That became my Terrain Model: become aware of signals, understand how they connect, take practical action, restore what can be restored, and build resilience over time.

AwarenessUnderstandingActionRestorationResilience

Eight connected domains, one human terrain

A simple map of connected influences; the book turns them into 19 practical foundations.

1. Nourishment & hydration
2. Gut & elimination
3. Sleep & oxygenation
4. Movement, strength & muscle
5. Metabolic & vascular health
6. Stress & emotional regulation
7. Environment & medication burden
8. Relationships, purpose & daily habits

Foundation 1: Awareness, the first foundation

Knowledge is not enough if we do not notice what is changing inside us.

Notice what is changing

• Visible and felt signals may include a growing waist, dark urine, constipation, poor sleep, brain fog, fatigue, or declining stamina.
• Simple measures such as blood pressure, waist, glucose patterns, bowel rhythm, sleep, energy, and function can reveal direction over time.
• Some important disease processes remain silent; absence of dramatic symptoms does not prove absence of risk.

A daily body-awareness check

Hygiene is not cosmetic; it can reveal early changes in comfort, function, infection risk, and the ability to care for yourself.

Silent disease can build for years

The absence of symptoms does not mean the absence of disease.

• Atherosclerosis in coronary and carotid arteries can progress quietly for many years before a heart attack, TIA, or stroke reveals the burden.
• A person may feel reasonably well while vascular, metabolic, or inflammatory risk is accumulating underneath the surface.
• Risk history, physical examination, laboratory trends, and appropriate imaging can help qualified clinicians decide when deeper evaluation is warranted.

Plain language. Atherosclerosis: buildup of fatty plaque inside artery walls. TIA: a temporary stroke-like episode caused by interrupted blood flow; it needs urgent medical evaluation.

A personal example: a bruit changed my course

Nine years after my stroke, a careful examination revealed another silent danger.

• Before my son’s wedding in 2007, my physician detected a carotid bruit during a routine examination.
• Imaging showed about 95% narrowing of my right carotid artery. I was strongly advised to undergo carotid endarterectomy, and the severe blockage was treated.
• I have not had another major stroke for nearly two decades. No single intervention can explain that outcome, but detecting a major silent risk created an opportunity to act.

Plain language. Bruit: a whooshing sound heard with a stethoscope over an artery. Stenosis: narrowing of an artery. Carotid endarterectomy: surgery that removes plaque from a major neck artery supplying the brain.

Preview text © 2026 Dr. Naresh Chand, reproduced with the author’s permission. Educational discussion, not personal medical advice.