4 Tips on How to Eat Right – Sadhguru
Sadhguru: This is something
we have been talking about forever! But now they discovered it
with billion-dollar research. And I’ve seen hundreds and thousands of people
who just become healthy and well. If something appears on my plate, if I just feel this, I know what to eat
and what not to eat. You eat something today and see, just learn to observe how
agile and how active your body feels after eating this food. Sadhguru: The simple thing right now that’s
a rage in the world is, if you come to our ashram, all the people there
who are physically immensely active, eat ten o’clock in the morning,
seven o’clock in the evening, two meals. How many doctors have been telling me that they will die of
malnourishment, this will happen, that will happen,
you must do this, you must do that.
I eat only one meal a day,
most days; one big meal I eat and that’s it and doctors telling me,
“No, no, Sadhguru, the way you’re traveling, this will happen, that will happen. You must eat at least once in four hours,
something you must eat.” I said, “Leave me alone,
I’m doing fine.” But now a big university in America comes up with
this called “intermittent fasting”- it’s not nonsense, it’s good. But they rediscovered something
that we have known forever. Now everybody’s saying there must
be a sixteen-hour gap, then all your ailments will go away.
What the hell were we
saying all these thousands of years? The simple thing is… There are many,
many aspects to this, psychological, and physiological, but
now cancer is on the rise in the world. A cancerous cell is like a criminal in
society, all of us have in our bodies, only if they become… their concentration
becomes more than what they should be or they gang up and loc…
locate themselves in one place, they become organized crime. There are pickpockets in Kochi,
I am sure. Hello? There are small-time criminals, individually operating,
operating in two’s and three’s; we don’t take it very seriously,
we’ll leave it, because it happens, but suppose all hundred of them
got organized into an organized crime, now we will crack down, because we know now
it becomes a threat to the society.
Similarly, cancerous cells are like this – criminals, they’re moving around
doing some damage, their only problem is, right now, they’re generally eating about eight
to twelve times more than what the
other cells are eating. So if you just give sufficient breaks between
one meal and the other, most of them will die,
because they cannot survive. This is something we’ve
been talking about forever, but now they discovered
it with billion-dollar research. And I’ve seen hundreds
and thousands of people who just become healthy and well, simply because they’re not fueling
up all the time when the tank is spilling. In the yoga center, all the time
people are physically active. So everybody is very hungry by the time it’s
3:30 – four o’clock in the evening, they are extremely hungry, but we learn to live with that. because an empty stomachs and hunger
are two different things. Hunger means your energy
levels start dropping. but an empty stomach is a good thing.
In the yogic sciences – today modern science
also is coming in line with this, but what we know from our experience, you will spend
a billion dollars to come here, because research is all about
“How many million dollars?” that’s how it is. Your body and your brain work at their best
only when your stomach is empty. So we always make sure,
we eat in such a way, how much ever we eat, our stomach must be always empty within two to two-and-a-half
hours’ time maximum. So we go to bed hungry always. People think they cannot sleep –
they can sleep! On average, for twenty-five
years on average, I slept only two-and-a-half
to three hours. These days, I’m getting
a little lazy and sleeping anywhere between
three-and-a-half to four-and-a-half hours, despite the level of
travel that I have. When I say the level of travel, if I say my level of travel in the
next few days, you will fall off your chair. Yes! Should I tell you? No. Not necessary (Laughter).
Because in the next ten days, I’m in five different countries, doing I don’t know how many events,
all kinds of events.; So you can keep this up simply
because you don’t overeat. It’s very, very important. Everybody eats two meals;
I generally eat only one meal, 4:30 – 5:00 in the evening because I don’t like to sit in
front of the plate and worry about how much to eat. I like to eat well. So 4:30 – 5:00 in the evening if I eat a
meal, it’s only the next day.
Is this enough?
Am I looking okay? Hello? Participants: Yes. Sadhguru: Because any correction and
purification that needs to happen in the body, your stomach needs to be
empty – it’s very, very important. Otherwise, the purification on the cellular
level will not happen. You pile up things and then
you have all kinds of problems. When you… When you don’t touch the food,
you do not know what it is. If food is not good enough to be touched, I don’t know how it’s good
enough to be eaten (Applause). Dr. Mark Hyman: So we should
not have listened to our mothers and we should eat with our fingers because touching our food
helps us stay in contact with it.
Sadhguru: You can… the cleanliness of your
hands is entirely in your hands. The cleanliness of the fork is not entirely
in your hands (Laughter/Applause). Dr. Mark Hyman: This is true. Sadhguru: And nobody else but you
has used these hands (Laughter), so there is an assurance as to how
clean or not clean it is, right now. The fork, you do not know
who has used it, how they’ve used it,
for what they used it and all they have to do is
wipe it with a tissue and give it to you and it looks
pretty clean (Laughter).
Above all, you don’t feel the food. The first thing that’s been taught to us is, if food appears in front of you, to hold your hands
upon the food for a few moments, just to feel how the food is. If something appears on my plate, if I just feel this, I know what
to eat and what not to eat. What I should not eat, I don’t taste
and then reject it, I just don’t eat, because my hands are the first level- not tasting in the sense, the tongue
tastes but knowing the food.
The first thing is knowing the food. If you want to know a person, and you guys
go and shake their hands (Laughs). I’m usually avoiding
that, but… (Laughter) Mark Hyman: That’s a
good strategy (Laughs). Sadhguru: But the food that’s
going to become a part of you, the first thing is your hands, even if you physically don’t touch it – just being conscious and being there, it tells you how the
food will behave within you. Whether this particular food,
on this particular day, should it go into you or not because every day your
body is not the same thing. Every day, every moment it’s
different. If you feel the food, you just know whether this food has
to go into you on this day or not. If that much awareness is brought in, we don’t have to go on telling
people, what they should eat. Every meal they must decide
what they should eat in that meal. There is no one prescription that,
“This is what you should eat for your life.” That will feel too claustrophobic that
“only this I can eat.” Sadhguru: Your selection of food and consumption
of food also must happen consciously.
More than what you eat, how you eat it is
also equally important. When I say, “How do you eat it?” These are all live substances, every one of
they had a life of their own, whether it is a plant, animal, vegetable,
every one of them had a life of their own. Now in some way, you are
making food out of it, you must consume it
with utmost gratitude. If you approach it with a
a certain sense of gratitude and reverence towards the
food that you eat; when I say reverence it may feel
like too much for you, but I’m asking you, let’s say we put you in a room
and you had nothing to eat for five days.
If God appears in front of you,
what will you ask for? Food? So that is how important it is. You must understand, the food on your plate
is not just a substance, it is not a material, it is
not a commodity, it is life. It is the life-making material for you. So you must treat it as such. Right now, when it is on the plate
when it is out there, it has no value but the moment you consume it
and it becomes your flesh and blood, now suddenly it’s of immense value.
Why do we live like this? It is very important when it
comes to your plate itself, you must treat it as a part of yourself. With great reverence, you must consume. Just the way you consume it
if you change that, food will behave very
differently within you. This is what consciousness means. If people say, “Your consciousness
has no impact on your life, only chemical structures
have an impact.” I’m very sorry for them because
that is not how life works. Human consciousness has a profound impact on everything that we touch, especially the food that we are making
another life as a part of ourselves. When we are doing such an act, it is very, very important we
treat it with utmost gratitude and reverence.
I want to tell you there is no such thing
as good habit and bad habit. Habit means you are
functioning unconsciously. If you are functioning unconsciously that’s a bad thing, because the whole thing about
being human is we are capable of doing
things consciously. That is the beauty of being human that we can do
everything consciously. What an animal does unconsciously we can do the same thing consciously. We can eat unconsciously
or we can eat consciously. We can breathe unconsciously
or we can breathe consciously. Everything that we can do,
we can do it consciously. The moment we do something consciously, suddenly that human being looks
very refined and wonderful.
Just because somebody walks
and speaks consciously, doesn’t he become a
beautiful human being? Yes or no? Participants: Yes.
Sadhguru: That’s all. So why is it that we are trying to develop
habits as if this is a good thing? Habit means fixed realities, where you don’t have to think. You get up in the morning
and it’ll happen to you. No, don’t try to automize your life. That is not efficiency.
That is the efficiency of the machine. This one is supposed to function
intelligently and consciously. Nobody is expecting it to
function like a machine. So about food and stuff – food must be suitable
for the body that we eat for – it is for the body. This is the building material for this body,
the food that you’re eating. What is the appropriate food, unfortunately, is all
messed up right now. Traditionally we ate very
sensibly in this country, but these thousand years of invasions
have brought other kinds of food cultures and today the national diet
is pizza or pasta. What is it? Which is one, I don’t know,
both were competing. So we are losing our sense of food. It’s time to look at what is
the most suitable thing.
If I go into that food, it’s
a very long process, but you must experiment with food, not just by the tongue, but by the body.
You eat something today and see, just learn to observe how
agile and how active your body feels after eating this food. If it feels like it wants to
go to the grave, that’s not good food. If it feels like it wants to be alive after
eating this – except coffee, because that’s a stimulant – if you eat food and your body
feels very agile and alive, that means it’s good food,
and the body is liking it. If you eat something,
it feels dull which means it’s not like it. It’s having
difficulty with it, that’s why it feels dull. So just on this basis. There’s a much, I mean this is the very
simplistic way of putting it.
