Food by yoga

We have perhaps terabytes and libraries of information devoted to what to eat to stay fit but little is talked about the 'how to eat' what you eat.
An ayurvedic saying goes that you can digest and neutralise even poison if you have strong bowels, eat only when really hungry and moderately. This applies to how we should treat our food after we have decided what we should eat.

The first cardinal principle about eating is that we must not consume when we are not hungry. I would cite here yet another traditional saying, which when translated from Sanskrit reads- eating when hungry turns food into tonic while eating without hunger turns it into a toxin. This is for those who are gulping mugloads of coffee and tea and snacking day in day out in the name of socialising, official business or when they are plain bored.

From yoga perspective, there is no greater torture to your physiology- the metabolic processes that take place in your body- than consuming without hunger or to be precise, hunger pangs- atleast 10 minutes of hunger pangs ensure we have sufficient flow of digestive juices in our stomach, which is when the latter is ready to receive food.

We must understand that thirst and hunger are calls of our biology and that our system just cannot be loaded with food it is not ready to receive. Equally important is the time we spend munching on each morsel of food. Ayurveda is clear about this- chew a solid morsel of food till it is liquid, and roll a sip of liquid with biting movements of teeth like you would do to a solid morsel, before you gulp it down.

It is not difficult to understand that significant part of digestion takes place (read, should take place)in our mouth. And we all know how lethargic we are at keeping a morsel in our mouth and chew long enough, given the fact that our civilisation is infamously pressed for time.

A solid morsel must be chewed 30-40 times before we could call it liquid, as ayurveda would have it. The digestive process in our mouth has to ensure that the digestive enzymes mix well with the well-ground solid food for the system to draw nutrition from and then assimilate it.

Partially chewed and enzymes-mixed food particles in our system rot. Such crumbs of food have to be treated with larger volumes of acid in our stomach than normally needed. The acid ensures disintegration of food and later its assimilation and hence elimination of toxins from our system An acidic system is largely due to this incomplete digestion. It is important to cite here the latest research- prolonged use of antacids takes away much of your bones strength and can cause fractures. So, watch out.