Eating food is not just a survival process, You eat a certain kind of food because you want to have a certain kind of body, mind, emotions, and energy. If it is just about survival, you can eat anything and survive, but it’s not just about that. In yoga what you eat and how you eat has been looked at in a particular way. There is a complete science behind the conscious eating process. Eating should not be just a survival tool, its a question of choice for you. Having said this I am not saying that everyone in India or the world can choose, unfortunately there is still a certain segment of population who have no choice and have to eat what comes on their way, but at least this thing is certain that all those who are reading this article, they have the necessary means & arrangements to choose what they want to eat, not what is coming on their way. For those who don’t have a choice, it’s our responsibility as individuals to help them as much as we can, but then social uplifting of such people is a different story altogether, hence we will not be diving deep into that subject. I have already mentioned it and I will say it again, that the spiritual process begins at different times for different people depending upon the kind of financial, social & cultural environment they belong to. Only when the survival needs of a person are met, he can take himself to the next level. You can always start your journey from where you are right now, not from where you wish to be. So let’s restrict us here to the main topic of discussion, which is food.

Now as I mentioned that food should be a conscious choice for us. Once there is a choice, the next question comes: What should we eat, and What should we not? There is a very scientific approach which is suggested in yoga, that is ‘Eat what is good for you, do not eat something just because you have a strong compulsive strive to eat that food. You should have the necessary awareness wherein you can consciously choose your food. I know there is a small section of fools in our society who have made food as their religion & philosophy. They are really the ignorant and idle people who have nothing else to do. They don’t seem to understand that food is not about the religion, food is about our body. You should eat what will nourish your body. Why are we becoming so insensitive to this very simple fact, we need to look into this. The reason is that there is just a small chunk of people who want to politicize just about anything including food to gain publicity. As a citizen of this country& the world, It’s my humble request to you all, that please do not give credit to such people. It’s an irony, where eating food becomes a national debate. Don’t we have enough issues going on in our society? We need to accept our responsibility and decide not to politicize it more. We need to stop this with immediate effect.

The science behind choosing the suitable food for eating: The thing is only this, We should eat that kind of food which passes through our body & the system with the minimum amount of resistance. Let’s understand what is happening when we are eating food. When you eat, you are essentially making something which is not a part of yourself as a part of yourself. That means whatever you eat should become a part of you. If the food doesn’t integrate with your body, that means certainly you are eating the wrong food, Isn’t it? In fact, when you eat something, your very body starts to tell you whether it will get easily digested or not. When you eat something and you feel lazy, that means certainly there is something wrong with the food.

You eat food to rejuvenate your body & the whole system, Isn’t it? But when you eat and you feel bored and lazy, that’s a problem. When we consume something which has a certain amount of complex memory, emotions & information then the ability of our body to break it and make it a part of our self is reduced. Here I am referring to the non-vegetarian food. All the animals which we kill and consume have a certain amount of vibrancy, complex genetic code which is the memory and there are a certain amount of emotions present in that creature. Now when you kill such kind of creature and eat it, your body will find it difficult to digest, and the reason is very scientific, since that creature had certain complex emotions, your body will struggle, and in fact scientists are now saying that there is a high probability that the emotions of the creature which we are eating may find the manifestations in the person who is eating it in the form of aggressiveness, anger, anxiety and many other ways. I am sure every one of us is aware of this phrase since are childhood i.e ‘You become what you eat & think’. This has become a scientifically proven reality today.

Contrary to this if you eat as simple memory code in a particular creature let’s say vegetable or plants, it becomes very easy to make that as a part of your self. Or if we see it scientifically, In the evolutionary scale whatever is furthermost away from you, that’s what you should consume. Or in other words you should never consume a mammal because it is too close to you on the evolutionary scale in terms of human emotions, reproduction, survival and various other aspects and its memory is very very complex like your memory is. You will never be able to break it completely 100 percent. Which means some of it gets digested and some of it still remains in the form of emotions, memory, and information. And as you continue consuming these, unknowingly the emotions and the memories which you inherited by eating food will start manifesting in million different ways as some of them I have already mentioned above. What kind of body, mind, emotions you have is affected to a reasonable level by the kind of food you are eating. Your body is nothing but the accumulation of food, hence how it becomes is also decided by the food you eat.

Let’s take another aspect related to eating food. If the food you eat stays in your system (Stomach) for the minimum amount of time, that is the best food to eat. Vegetables and the different types of salads, sprouts which we consume gets easily broken down within a small period of two to two and half hours. However, if you are eating meat, It will stay in your stomach for as long as 7-9 hours. The longer it stays in your body, the worst it becomes for your system, because after a certain amount of time, it will start making toxins in your body which are not healthy and affects your body in a negative way. If you go to a doctor and ask him, what should be the time gap for eating the meat, even he will normally suggest you have it in the alternate days or after two days time gap.

Let me bring some live facts which are available today regarding non-vegetarian food. In western countries, medical research shows that almost 70 percent of the people who had cancer or any heart ailments & heart attacks were non-vegetarians. You would be astonished to know that many sports people are now shifting to the proper vegetarian diets to prolong their sports career. 70 to 80 percent of the martial arts people are vegetarian. Their physical agility and prowess is just phenomenal & food plays a great role in that. The kind of flexibility which needs to have in our body is greatly enhanced having a proper vegetable diet. Also in the yogic system, it is suggested that 40-50 percent of the meals which we consume should be raw vegetable, not even cooked meals because the amount of protein in the cooked food reduces to a greater extent when compared with the same veg meal uncooked. Meat essentially provides us an extra amount of proteins, however, if we make raw vegetables as a part of our daily diet, meat is not even required because the proteins which you get from meat can be fulfilled by the raw vegetable diet itself.

The debate which revolves around cruelty aspect of food: This is the question which I am sure 90 percent of the people ask, but still they don’t have the proper answer to it. Let’s demystify the cruelty aspect. Most of the vegetable-eating people accuse the meat eaters that killing an animal is a cruel act. My comment here would be that even killing plants is as cruel as killing an animal. Whether we agree or not, but killing a mammal or cutting a plant is equally cruel. We all know that plants are alive, but what scientists further say is that the level of awareness and the complexity of code which a plant carries is much much less than the level of awareness and the emotions an animal carries. And I have already elaborated in the above discussion that we should eat the simplest possible code which can be easily integrated with our body. Hence when it comes to the question survival & eating food, we have to do this cruel act, we can’t escape it, but we can do it by causing minimum harm to nature & also consciously deciding what is good for our body and what not.

With all the above dialogue, Am I 100 percent in favor of eating vegetables and totally against non-vegetarian food. No, It’s not the case. With all this explanation my only effort has been to make you aware of the science of eating the food. I am no one to tell you what you should eat and what you should not. My responsibility as a human being is to sensitize you and make you more and more conscious of this subject as it plays a significant role in our life. Food is not just a mean to fill your little belly, it’s the very seed of the way you will become and the way you will experience life. You all are educated enough, you all are intellectual people, It’s just that you need to deploy your intellect consciously here as well. Till now we were eating unconsciously & compulsively, now we would choose to eat consciously.

So, at last, I will end this article with a very simple suggestion, that whenever you feel you are hungry, please don’t ask a doctor or a nutritionist or a dietitian what you should eat. Ask your body what it demands and just go for it consciously. Your body will speak to you and will take you to the right kind of food…….

PS: In our next article we would be exploring the relationship between yoga and exercise and its impact on our lives at physical, emotional, psychological and energy levels……. So stay tuned!

Happy Reading 🙂