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Your physical body is just an accumulation of food. You must pay much attention to food because what kind of food you put into your system has a tremendous impact on the kind of body you have constructed. There is a whole yogic science behind what to eat, how to eat, and when to eat. What kind of stuff you put into it determines the quality of the body and how comfortable it is with itself.
Are you preparing this body to run as swiftly as a cheetah? Or are you preparing this body to carry two hundred pounds? Or are you preparing this body so that it becomes conducive for higher meditative possibilities? You need to eat the right kind of food depending on your inclination and what you want out of your life.
The way you eat not only decides your physical health, but the very way you think, feel, and experience life. Trying to eat intelligently means understanding what kind of fuel this body is designed for and accordingly supplying it, so that it functions at its best.
Let us say you bought a gasoline car, but pumped diesel into it. It might still move around, but it would not function at its optimal capacity, and its life span would also be substantially reduced. Similarly, if we do not understand what kind of fuel this body is designed for, if we just force whatever comes onto our plate into our systems, it will definitely not function at its optimum capacity and its longevity could be seriously compromised. The compatibility of the fuel and the machine is of great importance if you are seeking a certain caliber of service.
What kind of food is the human system really designed for?
If you eat certain foods, the body becomes happy. If you eat certain other foods, the body turns dull and lethargic, and your sleep quota increases. If you sleep for eight hours a day, and you live a hundred years, you have spent one third of your life sleeping! Another thirty to forty percent is spent on food, toilet, and other ablutions. There is very little time left for life!
You eat food for energy, but if you eat a big meal, do you feel energetic or lethargic? Depending upon the quality of the food that you eat, you first feel lethargy, and then slowly you start feeling energetic.
Why is this so?
One aspect is the fact that your system cannot digest cooked food as it is; it needs certain enzymes to do so. All the enzymes necessary for the digestive process are not present in the body alone; the food that you eat also contains these enzymes. When you cook the food, generally eighty to ninety percent of the enzymes are destroyed. So the body is struggling to reconstitute these destroyed enzymes. The enzymes that you destroy in cooking can never be totally re-constituted, so generally, for most human beings, about fifty percent of the food that they eat becomes waste.
Another aspect is the stress on the system. The body has to process all this food just to get a small quota of energy for its daily activity. If we ate foods with the necessary enzymes, the system would be functioning at a completely different level of efficiency and the conversion ratio of food to energy would be very different. Eating natural foods, in their uncooked condition, when the cells are still alive, will bring an enormous sense of health and vitality to the system.
One can easily experiment with this. Don’t ask your doctor, your nutritionist, or your yoga teacher. When it comes to food, it is about the body. Ask the body what kind of food it is most comfortable with, not your tongue. The kind of food your body feels most comfortable with is always the ideal food to eat. You must learn to listen to your body. As your body awareness evolves, you will know exactly what a certain food will do to you. You do not even have to put it into your mouth. You can develop this kind of heightened sensitivity whereby just looking at or touching the food will be enough for you to know its potential impact on your system.
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