Make the right food choices

Mindful eating is all about shifting gears for a guilt-free lifestyle, writes Nidhi Nahata

It’s so essential to make yourself a priority because a clean body manifests a clean mind. It is never said that a clean mind manifests a clean body, because ultimately the food that you eat dictates how you feel as well! After all, don’t we say “we are what we eat?” Nature has designed us to be happy and healthy in our natural environment. It is our lifestyle and the food we eat that forms the building blocks of our personality. It’s essential that we become more mindful as a species of eating what we have been designed to eat, and not what we might have been socially trained to crave.

Eat what you want

This is our first lesson in mindfulness: “Eat what you need, not what you crave!” We need to be mindful of the true needs of our physiology, and be more aware of what foods make our gut feel better, rather than our taste buds.

Cravings no more

Our second lesson on mindful eating is: natural food isn’t addictive and doesn’t cause cravings! Have you ever heard anyone say that they are addicted to raw vegetables and fruits? Probably not, right? We are predominantly addicted to things that are manufactured by people! We needn’t worry about how to burn calories or how to limit our food consumption in general, when we focus on this simple mindfulness lifestyle hack: 80% of our health depends on WHAT we eat; 15% of our health depends on us exercising; 5% of our health is dictated by our attitude towards life.

Food as medicine

The third lesson of mindfulness is: Let food be your medicine, not your entertainment. We fail to understand the universal message that Hippocrates preached centuries ago: “Food is our medicine and medicine is our food.” Nowadays we look at food very differently. We are preoccupied with how it looks, how it tastes, how it’s presented, how it’s packaged, and whether it’s trendy! This criterion doesn’t necessarily mean we’re looking for REAL food — it means we’re looking for something edible, attractive and convenient but that may not even be good for us! Real food is alive, it’s grown as a plant, and not produced in a plant (factory).

Cook it the right way

Our fourth mindfulness lesson is: Don’t just look at what you eat, but also how you eat it! It isn’t enough to be mindful of what we eat; it’s also important to be careful with how we prepare it. Aluminium and non-stick utensils and microwaves are easy and convenient for cooking but what’s not disclosed is that these convenient apparatuses are harmful to our body and may make food carcinogenic or toxic for us. Steel, cast iron utensils, and clay pots are safer and are mineral-rich instruments for the preparation of food.

Stay healthy

The fifth step is that being healthy is easy! Being overweight, being plagued by diseases, living on pills is not how we are designed to be. Being healthy cannot be a far-fetched goal — it has to be our natural default setting, and nature has provided us with the means to achieve it: Sitting in the sun, drinking a lot of water, mindfully breathing, walking and eating largely raw, plant-based meals does the trick for most!

The gut feeling

The sixth step in mindful eating is to trust your instincts! We, as human beings are so withdrawn from our instincts and that’s where our problems stem from. If we look at nature, animals and birds know their diet instinctively, and without human
interference eat only what they’re meant to. We humans eat anything we can get our hands on and try to create food in a manner that’s totally detached from nature and with materials that are synthesised in laboratories. When we need to process food in order to make it edible for us, then it’s not food — it’s a food-like substance! These foods don’t nourish us the way they’re meant to and tax our organs more than rejuvenate them.

(The author is a food therapist.)