Category Archives: Treatment

Picky eaters, food lovers, creative eater, vegetarians and non-vegetarians… This entire globe is made of people with manifold eating habits and styles, isn’t it? Hey friends, did you know that how you eat, what you eat, when you eat, the way you cook,etc has deep impact on your thought processes, emotions, moods, behavior patterns and overall personality. It is said that “Mens Sana in a Corpore Sano”. It means that “A healthy mind resides in a healthy body”. So how does the body become healthy? The most simplest and significant way is through food. This blog post is a guide to what is the significance of food in our lives, how it should be cooked in order to gain optimum physical-psychological health out of it, food etiquettes and specific foods that boost your mood.

Food serves as the building block for your body and brain. If I ask you to eat full stomach for a day and remain starving for the other day, you can yourself see how your thoughts and activities get influenced by it. When your stomach is full it will give you a lot of vital energies so that you can work and stay energized. However, when you are starving you will feel low, gloomy, energy-less and weak. Similarly when your stomach is full you are likely to get energizing thoughts, and when you are hungry you feel irritated, low, sad, frustrated and so on. This simple exercise shows how important food is for our body as well as brain. It is like petrol or gas that we fill in our cars. When it’s full it runs fast and trendy, but when the petrol or gas is empty, the car becomes literally immobile.

Above its significance, food has its own unique properties. If you choose the right kind of food to eat, if you eat the quantity that is enough for your body, you will surely reap good and healthy benefits of healthy eating. Here are some tips to help you in the above process:

• Try to get ample knowledge on the various nutrient-graph of food. That is which food is rich in what, as in vitamins, proteins, fats, carbohydrates, etc. This will help you to plan your platter accordingly.
• Watch your weight, height-weight proportion and have food on that basis.
• I have seen quite a lot of people who starve themselves to death in order to lose weight or look fab. For those folks out there, I wanna say that “balanced eating is far much better than no eating”. Instead of starving yourselves try to have a balanced diet. Cut out foods that increase bad cholesterol, unhealthy fats, etc. Rather than making your plate a “zero food’ scene, try eating food varieties that are rich in different nutrients. A little dose of every nutrient will not only help you have a balanced weight but will also enhance life-force, well-being, feel-good factor, positivity and goodwill.
• Do not over-eat or under-eat. This will leave you either too much full or starved respectively.Try experimenting on different food quantities. You need to focus on the proportion of food to number of servings. For example number of servings in a whole meal will be different than eating fruits. So you need to mix and match on what fits the size of your tummy. I said do not over-eat or under-eat because filling your stomach to the wrong proportion will affect your body metabolism and digestion process.
• Do you have a habit of drinking water between meals? Do you drink water right after having food or do you give some temporal space between water and food intake? Here, I would like to add that drinking water immediately after food or in between a meal is one of the most important factor leading to disastrous health hazards. So try to give at least half an hour break between food intake and water intake. This habit will help you to keep many health issues at bay. It will also improve metabolism, homeostasis, digestion, and so on.

The way food is cooked has an enormous impact on our thought processes. If you cook food in an angry and grumpy mood, the outcome of that phase of cooking will be obviously different from the phase when you cook food in a calm and pleasant manner. This is a very common phenomenon, isn’t it? However, do you know the science behind it? For this you need to understand the macrocosmic and abstract nature of food and the human body. Each and every thing and being is made up of matter, right? And matter consists of protons, neutrons and electrons. Similarly, food and the human body is also made up of these. Due to free electrons, there is energy flow from one matter to the other. If you know that energy flows from a higher source to a lower level, you can understand this easily. If you have a full-on load of positive energies while cooking, that higher level of positive energy will flow from your hands to the food or cooking-in-process and vice-versa. That is why it is always said to cook food in a good, calm and composed manner so that you pass on positive, healthy energies into the food. The same phenomena works while seasoning, garnishing and serving food too. This was a brief idea of how your body or energy system affects food.

Now let’s see how food affects your body and mind on a subtle level. In the Yogic Perspective, our body is made of five koshas or sheaths above our skin. These sheaths are related to the food we take, our thoughts, our behavior, etc. The Annamay Kosha or the food sheath is the first outer covering of human body. So whatever you eat, depending on the nature of that food and with what intention you eat will have a tremendous impact on your body, psyche and soul.

Keeping this higher science of food dynamics in focus, here are some tips of “effective cooking”, I would like to share with you:

• Before cooking try to make yourself calm and composed.
• While putting the first ingredient in the cooking vessel, it’s always good to say a few lines on thankfulness for the food you got.
• You can also make your wishes or positive affirmations while cooking. This will help your sub-conscious mind to prepare ground for those actions. Moreover, it will also enhance self-confidence, motivation and positivity.
•  While serving food, try not to serve with a disturbed mind because that ways you will be serving disturbed energies too. Serve with goodwill and optimistic thoughts.

Food for the body is not enough. There must be food for the soul.
Dorothy Day

As I have said earlier, the way in which you eat food, serve food, cook food reflects you personality and behavioral patterns. Some people are picky eaters, some are messy eaters, some eat too fast, while some eat very slowly, some prefer discipline while eating, while some eat by dancing and hopping, some throw food, others preserve food…So folks there are variety of food habits. And your food habits are the reflections of your personality, healthy and moods. All the above ways depict whether you are clam or anxious, depressed or angry, disciplined or messy, introverted or outgoing, stressed out or relaxed, frustrated or happy. Following is a brief sketch on the different variety of foods and how they affect you:

Food is said to be one of the priceless gifts to mankind. Respecting and consuming food in a proper way will not only help us butt also help our fellowbeings to survive in a meaningful way. So from now on:

Let us eat to live and not live to eat. The time you are wasting food in some part of the world, some other is just dying out of hunger. Food is precious, respect it and share it.

Best Wishes,

Sareeta