What to Eat
#1 Eat What Makes You Agile and Alive
The decision whether a particular food should go into you or not changes from day to day, because your body is different every day and every moment. If you feel the food, you just know whether it should go into you on this day or not. If the necessary awareness is brought in, we do not have to tell people what they should eat. Every meal, they should decide what to eat this time.
There is no one prescription of what you should eat for the rest of your life. That said, sugars and carbs are definitely a serious issue. But the real long-term challenge is weaning people off meat. Almost 200 pounds of meat are consumed per capita in the US per year. And 3 trillion dollars are spent on healthcare – the healthcare bills in the US are higher than most nations’ GDPs.
This is a violent way to exist, and it is very hard on your system. Illness is the first level of violence. You cannot be peaceful when you are ill, because your body is in a constant battle. The fight with some virus, bacteria, or something else that comes from outside is one thing. But a chronic ailment is like a civil war. You created a battle within your own system, without an outside enemy.
Too many people die from chronic ailments, and more than that, even when they are alive, they cannot live well. And unfortunately, the maximum number exists in one of the most affluent countries on the planet. And this will happen to the whole world at some point. We see similar things in Indian cities. It is just that the US may be the forerunner. This sends the message that if affluence comes, we will lose all our sense. It is very important that the US corrects itself, because whatever they do, for some reason the rest of the world does, too.
#2 Overeating
Eating improperly and eating inappropriately are two big aspects. The way we “do” food is violent, and if we carry much more on this frame than what we should carry, it is a kind of soil erosion. Whatever number of pounds you shed does not go into the sky – it is going back into the earth. You prevent soil erosion!
We are allowed to carry what we want, but not beyond what is comfortable for us. The pain of existing like that is such that most people who are in this state have forgotten what it means to be light, agile, and really alive. It is not just about the medical aspects and the number of people who die. The biggest problem is the number of people who are alive but cannot live a full life.
#3 Eat Fresh
Every few years, a different theory emerges on what kinds of foods to eat, and there are a whole lot of people who follow it religiously. We should not be making food a religion. It is not about what you or someone else believes. It is about eating sensibly.
The first thing to remember is that essentially, food is fuel. If you want to refuel your car, you go to the gas station and choose the appropriate fuel for this particular machine, in order to achieve optimal performance. You could put kerosene into your car and it would actually drive, but it may smoke and cough, and you may not be able to accelerate as you want. This is the situation with most people when it comes to their food choices. To choose the appropriate fuel, you need to know what type of machine you are.
If you are interested in your wellbeing and that of your children, you must ensure that the food you eat is fresh. In the Yogic culture, we always consume cooked food within 1.5 hours after it comes off the stove. If it is any later, inertia will set in. If you eat food that creates inertia in the system, you will lose all your dynamism. There is also a correlation between the kind of food you eat and the amount of sleep you need. Generally, doctors advise that everyone must sleep a minimum of eight hours. If you sleep eight hours per night, it means you are sleeping one third of your life.
People are writing whole books on how everyone must sleep eight hours, and warn of dire consequences if you do not. These days, I am getting a little lazy and sleep for four hours. But earlier, for twenty-five years, I used to sleep less than three hours per day, and I am healthy. The body needs restfulness, not sleep. One important factor of how much sleep you need is what type of fuel you put into your system. If you put the wrong fuel into your car, it will need a lot of servicing. Similarly, if you put the wrong fuel into your system, it will need a lot of sleep.
#4 Eat What Is Far From You
Your body is just an accumulation of the food that you have eaten, after it has been transformed and assimilated. There is a certain intelligence, memory, and genetic code in the body that determines what the food that you eat is converted into. For example, the same apple, depending on who eats it, becomes part of the body of a woman, a man, or a cow.
As life evolves, the information and memory an organism carries get increasingly complex. In the Yogic tradition, we always said you must eat what is furthest away from you, genetically. In that sense, plant life is furthest away from us. If you must eat non-vegetarian food, we advised the consumption of fish, because among the animals, it is furthest away from a human being, if you look at it from an evolutionary perspective. As the first animal life on the planet is thought to have evolved in water, the first avatara was matsya avatara or the fish.
After a century of saying the best thing to eat is meat, doctors in the West are slowly shifting to a different view today. For some time now, they have been saying that beef is a main cause for most of the cardiac ailments in America. And in the last few years, they are also saying that meat consumption can cause cancer. In the Yogic culture, we have been telling you for ten thousand years that if you eat foods with a complex genetic code, your system will break down, one way or the other. We arrived at that not by doing million-dollar research, but just by observing what happens in our system when we eat. If you pay enough attention, you will know.
So, do not make food some kind of a religion. If it is a question of survival, eat what is available. But when survival is taken care of, there is a choice. When you have a choice, you must eat sensibly, what is best for your system. The ideal fuel for your body is what leaves you alert, agile, and active. You could experiment. One day, just eat fruits; another day, just eat raw vegetables; yet another day, you cook the vegetables; then you eat fish, you eat meat – try out everything. With what kind of food you are experiencing maximum levels of energy and alertness, please eat that, and you will be healthy.
#5 Digest This!
If you eat a fruit, within 1.5 to three hours’ time, it will be fully digested. If you eat cooked vegetables, it will take twelve to fifteen hours to digest them. If you eat cooked cereals and other foods, it will take twenty-four to thirty hours. If you eat cooked meat, it will take forty-eight to fifty-two hours. If you eat raw meat, it will take seventy-two hours to digest it. When food remains in the system for such long periods of time, it will rot and cause unnecessary levels of bacteria. With such food choices, you are causing damage to the system. And then you believe you need medicines, rather than living healthy. You need pharmaceutical products because you are generating poison within yourself.
What you put into your system can make a big difference. To give an example – when they first introduced ethanol gasoline about twelve years ago, I said, “I do not want to put ethanol in my car because the engine is going to rust.” You do not have to be some brilliant scientist to arrive at that – it is just common sense. Now, after it has been used for twelve years, they finally admit it may cause corrosion of the engine. You just have to pay attention to how things work. Most people do not pay attention to anything. For everything, they need a prescription.
If you have been eating the wrong kind of food for too long, the body may have become so lethargic and dense that you cannot notice anything. In that case, fasting will give you a break. It is time we teach people how to pay attention to what is happening in their system. Just ask yourself – is it working well right now or not? This is a simple way to know.
#6 Eat Local
Question: Namaskaram, Sadhguru. Is there a relationship between the body and that particular part of the earth where one is located? Does the specific place where someone grows up influence them? Is that why they tell us to eat the local food?
Sadhguru: How the deeper human system functions is definitely impacted by location. It is true with every other life also. The plant and animal life which is very comfortable in southern India would wither away anywhere around New York State or in that part of the world because the life here has evolved differently. It is not just because of the weather and the volume of sunlight or cold. Those have a big impact too, but why life has evolved in a particular way has something to do with the location.
In Yoga, the prescription for eating food is the distance a man can walk in a day. In a single day, the distance you can walk should be the radius of the area from which you eat. You should not eat food which is grown far away from you because the body that you carry is essentially a piece of this planet. If you are eating food from that specific area where you are living, there is a constant interaction between your body and the earth. Even today as you are sitting here, if you sit in this place, your body and this part of the earth on which you are sitting are in a constant state of very profound interaction.
It is because of this that being in contact with the earth is a very important part of one’s health and wellbeing. In the Yoga Center, we are always giving people who are not healthy work in the garden so that they are in touch with the earth. Today in modern spas, this being in touch with the earth has reduced itself to a mud bath. Well, you must be in touch somehow. It does not matter how you do it, either with a mud bath, by working in the land, sleeping on the floor, or whatever you do – essentially you are trying to be in contact.
#7 Eating for Wellbeing
Food is a transaction. What was in the earth, you are taking it into the body. The body will function best if the food you eat comes from that area of earth on which you are living. Suppose you live on a patch of land, grow your own food and eat it. Within a month’s time, you will see a very distinct change in the healthfulness of your body. I think we can bring down the incidence of cancer on this planet by at least fifty percent if we are in touch with the earth that we are living upon and the food comes from the area in which you live, not from somewhere else.
Right now, if I go for breakfast, the food may come from New Zealand, Vietnam, or who knows where. We are able to transport things around and there are supermarkets which can sell the world to you, but we are doing this more for pleasure, not for wellbeing.
#8 Eat Seasonal
In India, during summer the food is cooked in one way, during the rainy season in another way and in winter another way, according to the vegetables available at that time and what is suitable for the body. It is good to bring in that wisdom and eat as per the needs of the body and according to the weather or climate we live in.
For example, when December comes, there are certain foods which produce heat in the body like sesame and wheat. The skin usually breaks because the climate becomes cold, and people do not traditionally use moisturizing creams and things like that. So everyone ate sesame on a daily basis. It keeps the body warm and the skin clean. With lots of heat in the body your skin will not break. In summer, the body gets hot, so cooling foods were eaten. For example, in Tamil Nadu, they eat kambu (pearl millet). These things were fixed so that the body is able to adjust itself for that season.
#9 Plant-Based Diet
A live cell has everything to sustain life. If you consume a live cell, you will see the sense of health in your system will be very different from anything that you have known. When we cook food, we destroy the life in it. Eating food after this process of destruction does not give the same amount of life energy to the system.
#10 Fruit Diet
Digestion means jataragni – the digestive fires. If these fires have to burn most effectively, fruit is definitely the best thing. Unfortunately, a lot of people enjoy lethargy and inertia. Life has not touched them so they enjoy a part of them being dead. Sleep, intoxication, overeating and just lying down feels better than being alive, active and dynamic. Fruit may be a problem only for such a person because it will keep you alert and awake. One can know an extreme sense of joy, intoxication and a deep pleasure out of heightened levels of awareness also.
#11 Multigrain Diet
Today, doctors are saying that nearly 80 million Indians are heading towards diabetes. One of the reasons for this is because most Indian people are on a single-cereal diet. People are eating either only rice or only wheat. This can definitely cause health problems. It is important to bring in a multigrain diet in one’s life.
Traditionally, people always ate lots of grams, pulses, legumes and many kinds of grains. But slowly those things have gone away, and if you look at a southern Indian’s plate today, there will be too much rice and just a little bit of vegetable. This is a serious problem. This shift to a total carbohydrate diet that has happened in the last twenty-five or thirty years needs to be reversed because a person’s long-term health will be seriously affected if they just eat lots of carbohydrate and very little of other things. This is a basic conceptual change which needs to happen in people’s minds. The majority of the diet should not be rice but all the other things. Rice is your choice – whether you want to eat or not, you decide according to your hunger levels.
#12 Eating Right While Traveling
We cannot always eat the ideal kind of food, especially those of us who are traveling and doing a whole variety of activities. In case you end up eating something that makes your body a little sluggish – that is if you are sensitive to what is happening in the system – all you have to do is cut the next meal into half, or skip the meal. That is all it takes for the body to bounce back.
Travel definitely takes a toll in terms of fatigue, but you can minimize it by eating as little food as you can when you are in an airplane. If you need to eat something, eat a fruit or just drink lots of water. The mechanism of hunger involves certain acids working on the stomach lining, which create a craving to eat. If you drink a glass of water or eat a fruit, the acids get diluted, and the hunger diminishes.
“The very way you breathe, sit, stand, eat ,walk ,work-everything can become Yoga. You can use any process of life to transcend your limitations” Sadhguru
The main purpose of exercise is to increase circulation and the intake of oxygen. This can be achieved by simple movement of the best spine and various joints of the body, with deep breathing, and without violent movement of the muscles.
Proper exercise points of yoga
Proper exercise act as a lubricating mechanism for the joints, muscle, ligament, tendon, and other parts of the body, by increasing circulation and flexibility.The fundamental difference between the ancient wisdom of Yoga into 5 basic principles that physical exercise emphasizes the violent movements of the muscles, while Yogic exercises promote slow and conscious movements of the body.
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