The Hindu Business Line : Soul food, please

Eating indiscriminately becomes such a habit that you also eat to give company, celebrate, or return a treat. By flowing the wrong cues, eating becomes overeating leading to acidity, gas, obesity and all kinds of health disorders.

Tete-a-tete: Catching up on conversation and good food. - K. ANANTHAN

You have a choice: To live to eat, which makes life a suffocatingly unhealthy cage, or eat to live, where you breathe in freedom, walk in light and experience life flowing with ease. I suggest you opt for the `eat to live' path. It's healthier and more practical than living to eat. After all, you can't possibly make food your reason for living! There's far more to you than being a foodie.

The magnitude of our importance is brought home by sages. "Remember, God experimented on mountains before he made you," reminds the positive-thinking master, Rev Norman Vincent Peale. The great guru of Dehradun Chandra Swami propounds: "Man is a sleeping God. God is an awakened man."

High thinking

Elevating thoughts increase our energy and heighten our sense of well-being. Food becomes secondary. You don't lose your taste for it... you just don't attach excess importance to it. Certainly, eating does increase the brain-calming chemical serotonin and other natural tranquillisers in the body, which give us that secure, cosy, and satisfied feeling. So do have elevating thoughts and an elevating attitude. Practise elevated awareness at every opportunity. When commuting to work, allow yourself to be moved by the sincerity and purpose writ on the faces of fellow commuters or the roadside tea-vendor. See the innocence and dignity of the industrious little shoeshine boy. Admire the scenic blueness of the sky and spare an awed thought for the unseen intelligence that creates it. Imbibe joy from the spread of floral splendour — "See heaven in a wild flower," said poet William Blake.

The music of the masters

Mix only with the masters as far as possible. "Sri Aurobindo observes, "Cheerfulness is the music of the soul." While St. Augustine offers a gentle sagely humour: "I was pulled up to God through His Grace. I came down because of my weight."

So how much food do you really need in your stomach when your mind and being are so sated with spiritual sustenance?

Wrong eating cues

It's physiological too. When you are feeling able and stable, tiny transmitters around your intestines convey clear `I'm hungry' feelings at the right time. When you are upset and frustrated, they too are thrown into confusion. Now you eat not because you feel hungry, but because you feel bored, tired, unhappy, and inadequate.

Eating indiscriminately becomes such a habit that you also eat to give company, celebrate, or return a treat. By flowing the wrong cues, eating becomes overeating, leading to acidity, gas, obesity and all kinds of health disorders.

Create the right cues

Follow these tips to create the right cues:

When hit by `hunger pangs', drink three glasses of water. Drink the first two to assuage thirst. Sip the third slowly.

Get on the floor and do 30-50 abdominal crunches. This way, you train your mind to think that your `pangs' are your body asking for exercise.

Check out whether it is an emotional cue. If it is, assess it honestly. If you can do something concrete about it, rather than eat, get up and do it. If it is something beyond your powers, let it go as a lesson learned. If somebody is giving you problems, bless them and pray for them. Have faith that everything will be fine and, believe me, you won't need food as a placebo.

If something is niggling you, ask: "What else can I do besides eating? What are the alternatives?" Open yourself to greater possibilities. Make small new changes in your everyday life. Try a new strategy at work. Rearrange some ideas. Experiment with a new healthy recipe. Try a new exercise.

To balance your emotions, think gratefully of all the things that are going right in your life. Go on affirming their presence until you feel lighter and better, and the craving vanishes.

Don't make food the focus of meeting a friend, colleague, or cousin. Focus on the event or reason for meeting. I know of a mother and daughter who take long bus-rides point-to-point just to be with each other. They carry a few sandwiches `just in case'. But, eating is no big deal to them, being together is.

Include protein in your three major meals — breakfast, lunch and dinner. Protein promotes the hormonal glucagons, which balances with insulin, gives a beautiful energetic feeling and staves off false cravings.

Raise your fibre-food intake to promote fullness. Replace white bread with brown, whole-wheat bread/rotis. Have bran, barley, brown rice, oats, and beans. Load up on raw salads. Finally, laugh, smile, exercise, and sleep well. And remember, when you awaken to the fact that life is bigger than food, you dwell in greatness.

The writer is co-author of the book, Fitness for Life.

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