Dr. Avanti Kumar-Singh Is Done Pushing So Hard

For most of her life, Dr. Avanti Kumar-Singh believed working hard and pushing hard were the same thing. Today, she knows there’s a difference.

A physician, Ayurveda expert, author, and co-founder of Arvasi Wellness, Avanti has spent nearly two decades exploring what happens when ancient healing traditions meet modern medicine. But her path into this work wasn’t purely academic. It began with getting sick herself.

During medical training, Avanti went from a lifetime of good health to experiencing back pain, weight gain, headaches, digestive issues, anxiety, and depression. Her days inside the hospital had pulled her completely out of sync with the rhythms she’d unknowingly followed throughout childhood. She ate on the run, rarely saw daylight, and stopped doing many of the things that had once made her feel well. Eventually, she realized that the way she’d grown up as the daughter of Indian immigrants wasn’t simply family tradition. It was Ayurveda. Eating with the seasons, following daily routines, and living in rhythm with nature had been supporting her health all along.

That realization sent her back to the medicine of her ancestors. She pursued advanced training in Ayurveda and began developing what she calls “modern Ayurveda,” an approach that integrates the 5,000-year-old healing system with Western medicine and contemporary research. Today, that work includes two books, The Health Catalyst and The Longevity Formula, as well as Arvasi Wellness, where she focuses on helping women navigate perimenopause, menopause, and personalized longevity.

Then, in 2023, everything she had spent years teaching became deeply personal again. Avanti was diagnosed with breast cancer despite having no genetic markers or family history. She approached treatment the same way she approaches health: integratively. Alongside chemotherapy, a double mastectomy, and radiation, she worked with conventional specialists and an integrative oncologist. For Avanti, the experience reinforced her belief that Ayurveda wasn’t simply preventative. The practices she had spent years incorporating into her own life became part of the foundation that supported her through an extraordinarily demanding seven months of treatment and recovery.

That experience also helps explain why Avanti is wary of the wellness world’s obsession with optimization. In an era of sleep scores, trackers, elaborate routines, and endless advice about how to feel better, she believes we’ve started outsourcing something important: our ability to listen to ourselves. “We’re giving away our power,” she says. Her alternative is refreshingly forgiving. Follow the 80/20 rule. Do what you can. Pay attention to how you feel. Let go of the idea that perfect health requires a perfect routine. Wellness, in her view, isn’t about controlling every variable. It’s about rebuilding a relationship with your own body and recognizing that what works for someone else may not be what works for you.

That personalization is especially important in Avanti’s work with women. She believes conversations about midlife health often overlook two foundational systems: the gut and the nervous system. Chronic stress can influence how we feel throughout the body, and general wellness advice can only take us so far when every woman has a different constitution, lifestyle, and set of needs. Rather than adding more to an already overwhelming list, Avanti encourages women to understand themselves first and return to some remarkably simple foundations: sleep when nature sleeps, get outside during the day, eat in rhythm with daylight and the seasons, and make time for connection. In her own life, she turns to nature, meditation, silence, creativity, and the people she loves.

Perhaps that’s why one of her biggest lessons in midlife has been learning to loosen her grip on pushing. As a first-generation South Asian woman, daughter of immigrants, and the elder daughter in her family, working hard was woven into how she understood responsibility and success. She doesn’t want to lose that part of herself. She simply no longer believes effort has to feel like force.

“Working hard and pushing hard are not the same thing,” she says. “I will continue to work hard... But I don’t have to push hard.”

That shift is shaping what comes next. Professionally, Avanti is focused on reaching more women in midlife through Arvasi. Personally, she’s making room for the experiences, passions, and people that a demanding career in medicine didn’t always leave time for. After completing breast cancer treatment, she declared it her “year of yes.” Now, she’s extending that philosophy into something bigger: a life of yes.

Not yes to everything, but yes to what feels deeply right. “If something is not a full body yes,” she says, “then it’s a no.”

After a lifetime of achievement, medicine, healing, and reinvention, Avanti isn’t abandoning ambition. She’s simply learning that a meaningful life doesn’t have to be forced into existence. Sometimes the most powerful thing we can do is stop pushing long enough to hear what our bodies have been telling us all along.