Benefits of Eating Live Foods: Food for Your Body

The body is essentially an accumulation of food – breakfast, lunch and dinner. What type of food you eat definitely has an impact on what kind of body you build. In Indian culture, there is a tremendous amount of knowledge about what you should eat based upon the type of life you choose. If you want to become a wrestler, you eat one kind of food. If you want to use your brains, there is another kind of food. If you want to evolve spiritually, you eat another kind of food. It depends on what you are making the body fit for.
What to Eat?
What kind of food you eat should depend not on what you think about it, or on your values and ethics, but on what the body wants. Food is about the body. When it comes to food, don’t ask your doctors or your nutrition experts because these people keep changing their opinion every five years! When it comes to food, ask the body – not your tongue – with what kind of food it is really happy. Try different foods and see how your body feels after eating the food. If your body feels very agile, energetic and nice, that means the body is happy. If the body feels lethargic and needs to be pumped up with caffeine or nicotine to stay awake, the body is not happy, isn’t it?
Eat for Ease, not Dis-ease
In terms of the quality of food that is entering you, definitely a plant-based diet is far better for the system. We are not looking at it from a moral standpoint. We are just looking at what is suitable for the system – we try to eat foods which would make you comfortable in the body. Whether you want to do your business properly or study properly or do any activity properly, it is extremely important that your body is at ease. So, the kind of food with which your body would be most at ease and would not struggle to get nourishment out of, that is the kind of food we should eat. 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. One can develop this kind of sensitivity that if you just look at or touch the food, you will know.
How You Eat Matters
The content of the food definitely has a big impact on you, but how you consume it is equally important. Something that was a life by itself becomes a part of you. One life transforms itself into another – that is what eating means. It is not just digestion; it is one life fusing into another. When you put another piece of life into you, how it merges with your body and what this produces depends on how you keep your chemistry while you eat. How you should be, when you should eat, in what posture you should sit, and how you should welcome the food into yourself – these things are being completely ignored today.
Traditionally, in the Yogic culture we have always been taught how you should be when food enters your body, what condition you should be in, what posture you should be in, how you should approach it – these are very big things in the East. Not just the quality of the food we consume – how we consume, how wantonly or how consciously, is very important.