Yoga, Food & Health
There is an old tale, doing the rounds of urban India, about a young doctor on his way to a village as part of his internship.
At first he was delighted as the doctor there was old and almost ready to retire. However on approaching the village he was distraught to see it surrounded by lemon trees.
"Everyone knows that people who have lemons regularly never fall sick," he cried. “Don’t worry,” the older doctor reassured him, "That may be true, but what I don't tell them is not to eat the seeds!" It is said that all parts of lemons are healthy but for the seeds, even though an occasional seed now and then didn’t hurt anyone.
Recent studies would appear to prove that we’re eating ourselves to an early death.
Which explains why, despite all the wealth and abundance the incidence of disease continues to increase. So much so that, it is envisaged that 1 in every 3 cancers could be the result of improper nutrition. This site aims to be a practical guide that will help you understand the true place of food in your personal life.
For a start, how much to eat, what and when depends largely upon:
Your personal lifestyle. Your nutritional likes and dislikes.
Yoga is all about cleansing, and for purposes of cleansing, there’s nothing like a combination of herbs and spices. These, again, fall into two categories: heating and cooling.
Heating spices, by and large, taste pungent and include black peppers, ginger, cayenne, fennel, cardamom, cinnamon and cumin. They assist digestion and in burning off impurities. They can be cooked together with foodgrains, beans and vegetable dishes or, alternatively, taken as teas. Fresh ginger juice, taken with vegetables is warming. Likewise, ginger tea is a great choice in cold weather.
Cooling herbs, normally, taste bitter. These and include dandelion, burdock, aloe, gentian and turmeric and are especially good for blood cleansing and ridding the body of excess heat. Having burdock and dandelion tea in warm weather is an excellent idea.
But, perhaps, the best cleansers of all are organic fruits and are best had by themselves. You can either make a meal out of them or extract fresh fruit juices. If you find the juice too sweet, you could always dilute it with fresh water. However, you should limit intake of heavier fruits such as bananas and avocados. Fruit are cooling, so go easy on them in winters.
According to Yoga, how and when you eat is equally important. For one thing, no one should eat late at night; there ought to be a gap of at least 2, preferably, 3 to 4 hours between supper and sleep. Likewise, your meals should be freshly prepared and had with attention, respect and gratitude. While, we should eat to live, rather than live to eat, our food should also be tasty, so as to be liked. The attitude of the person cooking the food is just as important since the food is infused by the cook’s mood even though not all would care to admit it, most folks still prefer their meals prepared at home to lunch in a restaurant. That's why, and quite a few yogis only prefer to eat food prepared by themselves or other yogis.
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