How our Food defines us
FOOD: (FOOD SHOULD MAKE YOU HEALTHY)
We will focus on first element of health called “FOOD”.
Everyone has a doctor in him or her. We just have to help it in its job by eating healthy food.
"Our food should be our medicine and our medicine should be our food."
-Hippocrates
ONE STEP FORWARD (+1) OR 2 STEPS BACK (-2) THEORY
The food you eat either makes you healthier or less healthy. There is no neutral food. Every single thing you put in your mouth is either making you healthy or less healthy. There is always an opportunity /cost of what you put on your plate. If you put junk food on your plate, that’s 2 steps going minus because if had you put healthy food, you could have gone one step forward. We must choose food by following good food standards. The foods must satisfy all 4 criteria.
GOOD FOOD STANDARD
1. It must promote a healthy psychological response.
2. It must promote a healthy hormonal response.
3. It must support healthy gut.
4. It must support immune function and minimize inflammation.
Universally, there is one food that meets all the 4 standards which is called “SATVIK FOOD”. We also call it “GOD’S KITCHEN”. It comes directly from nature to our plates.
Example:-Fruits, vegetable, nuts and seeds.
What is Satvik food?
The simple, healthy, natural goodness of plants, lovingly rolled into bite-sized nature balls of deliciousness. Lord krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita, stated that we all are under the control of 3 modes of nature.The business or work we do, the activities we perform, the people we meet, and the food we eat can all be classified as satvik, rajasik or tamasik. Whole day we float within these modes.
Our food can also be divided as Satvik, Rajasik or Tamasik.
In Bhagavad Gita, Lord Krishna has explained what is Satvik , Rajasik and Tamasik food.
Food in the mode of goodness, increase the duration of life, purify one’s existence and give strength, health, happiness and satisfaction. Such foods are juicy, fatty, wholesome, and pleasing to the heart.
Foods that are too bitter, too sour, salty, pungent, dry and hot, are liked by people in the modes of passion. Such foods cause pain, distress, and disease.
Food cooked more than three hours before being eaten, which is tasteless, stale, putrid, decomposed and unclean, is food liked by people in the mode of ignorance.
HEALTH: IT’S A CONSPIRACY AGAINST YOU
This is another side of the story, where we blame ourselves for whatever the problem, we are in. But I strongly believe it’s not just our fault. We are victims of a big conspiracy. Our taste buds, our brain chemistry, biochemistry, our hormones, and our kitchens have been hijacked. Look around. There are many loud voices telling us what to eat? The loudest, of course, is the food industry.
The food-like substances, the hyper-portable foods in different tubs, jars, bottle, and shapes are placed at eye level in the supermarket and screaming at you with buy 1 get 1 offer to take them in your cart. It’s not your fault. You are not lacking willpower. You are not lazy.
Now, I am not trying to say that the choices you make are not your own or you don’t have the responsibility for the current health status issues. But what you have to understand is that these hyper-palatable, unhealthy foods have an unfair advantage. They are designed to mess with our brain. They are built to make us crave, they make it hard for us to give them up. And until you know the dirty secrets, you will never be able to quit process foods.Food scientists know our craving habits and patterns. Specific food cravings turn into poor eating habits in just a few days, leaving us stuck in a cycle of short term satisfaction and long term shame and weight gain. Let’s unlock the cravings, habits and pattern and correct them from their root.
DON’T BLAME YOURSELF
BLAME YOUR BIOLOGY
If we were hunting and foraging food in the forest, nature blesses us with some signals. For example, bitter taste signifies toxic food, while sweet taste signify a safer choice, thanks to nature and biology.
Our brains have been hard- wired to recognize 3 basic tastes: Sweet (a safe source of energy), fatty (a dense source of calories), salty (a means of conserving fluid). When we come across these flavors, the neurotransmitters in our brain help us to remember these tastes by sending us signals of pleasure and reward and reinforcement the experiences in our memories.These important signals help us to select the food best suited to our health.
Another important point to remember these signals from nature were not designed to tell which food was delicious.They were designed to tell us which foods were nutritious. Food scientists sitting in the big board rooms of big corporations are deciding the fate of our health. They know that our brains respond strongly to specific flavors (Sweet, salty, fatty) and armed with knowledge; they began to modify our whole foods. If you put a person in FMRI Machine (Functional Magnetic Resource Imaging) after giving food which is on high in sugar and scan their brains.
You will notice that their particularly one brain region called the Nucleus acumens, will lit like a laser beam. This is the same reward center which gets activated of cocaine, alcohol and drug addict.
ANCIENT SIGNAL IN FACEBOOK TIME
THE COMPLETE MISMATCH THEORY:
There is a complete mismatch between Nature and Facebook culture. We have evolved over a million years in certain environments; with a set of genes that are suitable for natural environment but we are using it in Facebook culture. It’s a big problem!
Human evolution occurred under wild conditions and this made us who we are. The modern human still operates on the same genes almost wholly unchanged. Eating highly processed food, sitting on our desk the whole day is making us sick. We are designed to be wild and by living tamely we make ourselves sick and unhappy. We are designed to move with grace, born to crave wide-open spaces and above all, born to love. Our body fixes itself. A big part of this is called homeostasis. Heart diseases, depression, cancer are the prices we pay for ignoring our genetic code, our design. But fixing this is easy. That’s where homeostasis comes in.
The task at hand is to get out of the ways and let your body wonderfully evolve abilities of self-repair do their job. In ancient wisdom, it is called vital power or Prana shakti. We will learn about it in the coming chapter.
How you eat, move, sleep, breathe and exercise, they all are inter-connected.
The change is doable, but you need to follow the process. So it’s not your fault, you found yourself here. But if you want a different outcome, you will need to do some things differently.