How to eat
Eating through the day
It is important not to keep eating through the day. If you are below thirty years of age, three meals every day will fit well into your life. If you are over thirty years of age, it is best to reduce it to two meals per day.
Our body and brain work at their best only when the stomach is empty. So be conscious of eating in such a way that within two and a half hours, your food moves out of the stomach, and within twelve to eighteen hours completely out of the system.
With this simple awareness you will experience much more energy, agility, and alertness. These are the ingredients of a successful life, irrespective of what you choose to do with it.
The Yogic Path
The yogic path is not a path of inherited belief; it is the path of experiment.
When you have your next meal, do not talk to anyone around you for the first fifteen minutes. Just be in active conscious response to the food that you eat, the air that you breathe, the water that you drink.
As said earlier, your entire system is responding anyway. Just become conscious of it. This apple, this carrot, this piece of bread—don’t take them lightly. If you do not eat for a couple of days, you won’t think about God. You will only think about food. This is what is nourishing you and making your life right now. This is the very substance of your body. Respond to food absolutely, with total attention.
This fruit, this egg, this bread, this vegetable—they are all a part of life themselves, but they are willing to become you. Would you be willing to do this for anyone? You are not even willing to surrender your little finger for someone else. Momentarily, you surrender just a little,
Usually when you need something. Your love affairs are the product of very calculated surrender. But food, which is a life unto itself, gives itself up completely to become a part of you.
Consciousness decision: raw or cooked food
Just experiment.
Start with twenty-five percent natural, uncooked, or live food—fruit or vegetables—today, and slowly push it up to a hundred percent in about four or five days. Stay there for a day or two, and again cut it down by ten percent and in another five days you will reach fifty percent raw food, fifty percent cooked food. This is ideal for most people, who wish to be active for sixteen to eighteen hours a day.
Remember, if you eat cooked food, it may take you fifteen minutes to eat a meal. If you eat raw food, you take a little more time to eat the same quantum of food, because you have to chew a little more. But the nature of the body is such that after fifteen minutes the body will tell you that your meal is over. So people tend to eat much less and lose weight.
All it takes is being a little more conscious of how much you are eating.
Eating Experiment
You can experiment.
Arrange the best possible meal for yourself, get angry with something, curse the whole world, and then eat it. You will see that day how food behaves within you. At the next meal, approach your food with the reverence that the life-making material deserves and eat it. You will now see how it will behave within you. (Of course, if you’re sensible, you’ll ignore the first and only do the second!).
Most people can bring down the quantum of food they are eating to a third and be much more energetic and not lose weight. It is just a question of how much receptivity you have created within yourself. Accordingly your body receives. If you can do the same amount of work, maintain all the bodily processes, with thirty percent of the food that you eat, that definitely means you are running a much more efficient machine.
Eating GHEE
The consumption of a spoonful of clarified butter (ghee in India) on a daily basis a few minutes before a meal does wonders for the digestive system. If you eat clarified butter with sugar, as in sweets, it is digested and turns into fat. But clarified butter without sugar can cleanse, heal, and lubricate the alimentary canal.
Additionally, the cleansing of the colon will immediately manifest as a certain glow and aliveness in your skin.
Even those who prefer not to consume dairy products could experiment with this because clarified butter passes through the system largely without getting digested.