Sometimes you may ask yourself why do I eat? What is food? And do we really need food to survive? All of these are good questions. Did you know that nearly 95% of what you eat goes out from you, while 5% is absorbed and only 0.5% goes towards developing our nutrition system. So when you think about food you may actually think, why do we eat, if 95% of what you eat leaves the body? We eat breakfast, lunch and dinner, we eat three times a day, sometimes five. But do we really need to have specific times for eating? I think we tend to follow the man made clock rather than our inner clock. When we come into this world we all have this inner clock installed that tells us when we are hungry. When a child is born and cries, why is he crying? Because he is hungry. You then feed the child. This is the natural way, when our senses give you identifiable feelings and correct impulses telling you when to eat. When your nutrition levels are low in your body, you eat and nourish yourself.
Now though do we just follow the rules? Wake up, eat breakfast, go to work and have lunch. We count the hours and minutes till lunch time. Then we come home rushing to cook again and eat dinner. Do we actually ever stop and think why we eat and if you are really eating because of hunger. I see a lot of people who eat simply because it is time to eat because we are all indoctrinated to blindly follow the story that we need breakfast, lunch and dinner. You know, ayurveda system does not say follow these routines on these days or such nonsense. Ayurveda says to identify your natural urges. Our bodies have natural urges, namely huger, thirst, elimination, breathing, sleeping, belching and so on. Like these other natural urges, I would say identify your hunger and treat it properly or otherwise you will produce more toxins into your body.
How do we identify hunger? The best thing is to pay attention to your body rather than just thinking this is my breakfast or lunch time. Again think about why you are eating and what you are eating which is called mindful eating. I will tell you how to identify if your hunger is coming naturally from the stomach and are created from genuine hunger impulses or if the visual impact of the food is making you hungry. A lot of people think about food and visualise the food and then get hungry. If you see somebody else eating then you get hungry because you see the food and you can smell the food. But that is not hunger. You have to be mindful about what real hunger is and how we set about satisfying our hunger. Let me tell you a story, one of my patients doesn’t have time to cook because she is a very busy person. And so for dinner everyday she has boiled rice and tomato sauce. And I thought how do you eat boiled rice and tomato sauce every day? Have you not had enough of that? Tomato sauce and boiled rice is not proper food anyway. And then she said, oh don’t worry, I put on a Gordon Ramsey or Jamie Oliver cooking video while I eat. Watching them I can imagine I am eating roast lamb, whatever they cook, I can feel my own senses saying what I am eating actually tastes like that. And I thought, that’s quite funny and at the same time quite scary because that is what the world has done to us.
All the magazines and cooking programs on how to cook influence us. I have seen a few thousand patients in my clinic, and I know how their cooking habits are formed. Most of them do not even have time to cook. That’s why even during family time they put a cookery program. You know why cooking programs are always aired between 6pm till about 8pm? Because that is the time people eat. One of my patients eats fish finger sandwiches every day but while watching cooking programs. The visual impact creates a far greater impact on our hunger and the satisfaction is greater than what we are actually eating in that moment.
Though that story is quite funny you can see what TV, magazines and articles are doing to us. But I think we have to think about ourselves and what hunger is. Be silent and only focus on your stomach or your whole body and think if you are really hungry. I had a patient I was treating for a few years and once he said to me that he had a stomach pain. I realised that it was not a stomach pain but that he was experiencing true hunger for the first time, the real feeling of being hungry. It is amazing how people do not pay attention to the natural impulses of their bodies. We have to understand our hunger and eat according to that. We do not live to eat or live for work. We are here for a bigger purpose. I think diet and food are there to keep our physical body going for that bigger purpose.
It is not necessary to always satisfy all our five senses every time we at by going to a fancy restaurant or cooking as such either. Do you think restaurants or other food vendors care about nutrition? No, they think about only the taste. When I watch these cookery programs I wonder how people are still living. Because they put cheese, cream and then all the meat, uncooked and cooked vegetables – everything together and eat. And your stomach is confused and wonders how to digest this. Think about what you are doing to your poor body. Anyways there is no point. Two minute or two second satisfaction on the palate and then it is gone from the other end, 95% gone. There is no point dwelling on the taste all the time, food with no taste is not good and food with only taste and no nourishment is not good either.
Mindful eating means identifying your hunger and understanding what is good for your body and take time to sit down and eat and identify when your hunger is finished, and your body is satisfied. Otherwise you eat for the greed and not for the hunger. People have the natural instinct that they are satisfied but sometimes carry on eating because of the taste and until the taste buds are satisfied. You usually stop eating then not because your taste buds are satisfied but because your stomach is so full that you cannot physically eat anymore. But still your taste buds crave more which is why even though your tummy is so full you go open the fridge and look for dessert. This is the time you really need to give attention to what you are eating. Are you hungry? Are you full? Why are you eating again?
These rituals about food are created to keep us in this food mafia, because the more you eat the more you get sick. The sicker you get the more the pharmaceutical industry gets involved in your life such as diet, food and medicine. I just think its time to listen to your body rather than any magazines, any health gurus or other medical experts. Don’t even listen to me, listen to yourself and understand that less than 5% is absorbed and that 95% is going out. Make sure that one or two days you concentrate on your body and check if you are really hungry. Whether you are eating for hunger or the visual impact of the food or whether you just want to taste the food you brought or that it is breakfast time or lunch time. Then give a little attention to the food, the combination of ingredients used to prepare it. Your body cannot digest it. It is like giving a 5 year old child a tough maths paper, they just can’t do it and they get everything wrong because they do not yet have enough knowledge to get it right.
The same thing happens to our bodies, which are very intelligent machines, but if you put all these things at once I don’t think the body will bother. Like the 5 year old child will not bother to answer the maths paper. That’s when we produce toxins, which are prime sources for our diseases. Basically, we should all think a bit carefully about food, are we going to continue being blind about the food and eat something some person designed or be more mindful about what we actually eat. Anyway 95% of what you eat is going out of you, so just stop and think, think carefully and you help prevent a lot of these disorders.
