What Are You Hungry For? (12 page)
Read What Are You Hungry For? Online
Authors: Deepak Chopra
Tags: #Health & Fitness, #Diet & Nutrition, #Diets, #Healing, #Self-Help, #Spiritual
1. Begin by looking at your food and taking it in visually.
2. Become aware of the food’s aroma; savor it for a moment.
3. When you taste each bite, intend to taste it fully, without distractions. See which tastes you can identify, using the six Ayurvedic tastes (discussed on
this page
–
this page
) as your guide. Appreciate the texture of each bite as you chew.
This exercise in mindful eating sharpens your awareness; it’s not meant as a continual practice. By eating even just one or two meals a week this way, you can gradually transform your relationship with food, achieving a new level of complete nutrition.
A Word About Inflammation
Recent medical research has focused on inflammation as a major contributor to many kinds of disorders, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and various cancers. It has long been realized that inflammation is hard to understand, because it is at once a completely necessary process and yet a damaging one. Acute inflammation is the body’s natural response to an injury or attack by bacteria, viruses, or fungi. When you sprain your ankle and quickly start to experience heat, swelling, redness, and pain, this is your immune system rushing in to protect and heal the injured tissues. Acute inflammation is temporary, lasting only a few days or weeks at most. Without it, wounds and infections couldn’t heal. But fever is a damaging form of acute inflammation, as is the severe inflammation that puts burn victims into shock and threatens their lives.
Not all inflammation is acute: Chronic inflammation is long-term, and can last for several months or even years. Instead of helping the
body heal, it stresses cells and tissues, and is linked to chronic illness. There are few symptoms at first to indicate that damage is being done, or even none. Normally, when you are feeling healthy and well, there is no need for the inflammation response, and yet it seems to be present in many people. The cause for this chronic condition is complex and not fully understood, but whenever your body goes out of balance, tissues can become inflamed, with the most likely cause being chronic low-level stress. Excess weight, belly fat, and lack of sleep may be contributors, too, since all are connected with stress hormones and metabolic imbalances. Toxins in herbicides, pesticides, and various chemical additives are suspect, leading some researchers to blame highly refined, processed foods as promoters of inflammation in the body, especially given the widespread use of hormones in animal feed to speed up muscle growth and increase milk production in dairy cows.
Chronic inflammation is also what medical researchers and nutritionists are referring to when they talk about inflammatory foods or diets. Some foods apparently contribute to chronic inflammation, while others help decrease it. Trans fats, sodium, and preservatives are potentially major sources of chronic inflammation. Whole, fresh foods decrease inflammation and provide valuable fiber, which may act as a buffer against inflammation.
In general, if you avoid FLUNC foods and favor fresh, real food, you can be assured that you are offering your body anti-inflammatory nutrition.
According to Ayurveda, a simple way to make sure that you are getting a balanced diet is to include every taste in each meal. Six tastes are recognized: the four usual ones—sweet, sour, salty, and bitter—along with two more, pungent and astringent, as described shortly.
Essentially, these six tastes are supplied by the whole range of foods in nature. In the centuries that preceded modern nutrition, including all six in every meal ensured that the major food groups and nutrients were represented, but it also provided a feeling of complete satisfaction, which in Ayurveda is just as important. When you finish a meal feeling satisfied, you will be much less likely to find yourself raiding the refrigerator two hours later, driven by a sense of lack.
The typical American diet tends to be dominated by the three tastes that the makers of snacks and fast food rely on as the most addictive: sweet, sour, and salty (the main flavors of the “special sauce” in a Big Mac, for example). You do need these tastes, Ayurveda says, but in excess they create cravings and therefore lead to imbalance; at the very least, fixating on sweet, sour, and salty is the same as excluding green leafy vegetables, the chief source of bitter taste, and most beans and legumes, which are astringent in the Ayurvedic system. In the Western scheme, these two tastes also act as anti-inflammatories.
To translate Ayurveda into Western terms, the six tastes are the codes that inform your nervous system about a meal’s nutritional content. Evolution has matched taste with the benefits of food—this is the wisdom of thousands of years of experience. The experience of taste is so subtle that unlike mammals whose nutritional requirements are satisfied with a narrow range of foods (e.g., lions subsisting on gazelles and other antelopes) or even a single food (e.g., koalas eating only eucalyptus leaves), human beings find too much of a single taste cloying—we range across the entire field of tastes in order to feel satisfied.
Let’s look at each taste in detail. Not every source of the six tastes exactly coincides with our usual perception, although most do. I will also mention some potential health benefits, but this requires a caveat. Intensive research is ongoing about how effective certain foods may be in preventing a host of lifestyle disorders, such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. Yet the fact that medical research has isolated a promising compound shouldn’t be considered proof positive that you will receive a major benefit, nor are Ayurveda’s traditional claims
a substitute for carefully controlled studies. The important thing is the holistic effect of eating a natural diet in which all the beneficial components of food come into play. Modern medicine is converging with Ayurveda to recognize that chronic disorders have many causes wrapped up with one another; therefore, finding holistic solutions is gaining increased respect after decades of hoping for magic bullets.
Sweet
Sources:
Grains, cereals, bread, pasta, nuts, milk, dairy, and oils are all classified as sweet foods, along with all fish, fowl, and other meat products. Besides ripe fruit, there are sweet vegetables, including tomatoes (technically a fruit), sweet peas, corn, yams, and sweet potatoes.
Foods that provide the sweet taste are considered the most nutritious in Ayurveda, rich in carbohydrates, proteins, and fats. Starchy foods that have no added sugar still belong to the sweet category because the action of saliva converts them into sugar. (Refined, processed sugar and corn syrup were unknown in India when Ayurveda was formulated.) If you examine your grocery cart at the checkout counter, you will probably recognize that you consume a greater volume of foods in this category of flavors than any other. The fact that there is added sugar in processed and snack foods boosts the sweet taste beyond healthy limits, as confirmed by nutritionists. Since the sweet category covers a wide range of edible substances from candy to quinoa, it’s important to note that at the Chopra Center, we’re never referring to refined sugar as a source for the sweet taste. Every taste should be balancing and nutritious; empty calories are far from that. In general, we recommend the following:
• Favor foods that are rich in complex carbohydrates, including at least five daily servings of vegetables. A half cup of most cooked vegetables or a cup of most greens constitutes one vegetable
serving. Choose from a wide variety of green and yellow vegetables.
• Reduce your consumption of all foods made with flour. The action of yeast in raised breads turns starch into sugar. Be aware that even if a loaf of bread is labeled “whole wheat” or “whole grain,” it is still usually made from grains that have been pulverized into flour rather than from whole or cracked grains. Thus, most whole-wheat bread ranks just as high as its white-bread counterparts on the glycemic index (that is, its carbs are no longer complex but simple, leading to a spike in insulin and blood sugar). Instead of eating bread, focus on eating grains in their natural state, including quinoa, wild and brown rice, millet, and wheat berries. Several delicious recipes for some of these grains appear at the end of the book.
• When you want to have something really sweet, make the sugars as complex as possible, meaning desserts made with whole fruits or eating fruit out of hand. Canned fruits in syrup, as well as fruit juices, are not recommended—their sugars either are simple or have been separated from the peels and other fiber. Don’t exceed two or three servings of fruit a day. One apple, peach, pear, or banana; a half cup of cherries; and half a small cantaloupe are examples of one fruit serving.
• Instead of meat and poultry, favor more vegetable sources of protein, including beans, legumes, seeds, and nuts. Although nuts are high in fat, most of it is polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat, which is better for you than the saturated fats found in animal products. Exclude hydrogenated or trans fats, which are created through a chemical process that transforms liquid oils into solid fats. Nuts contain many beneficial phytonutrients (which we will discuss in more detail later) and have been shown to lower cholesterol levels.
• Favor fresh, organic dairy products. While there is ongoing controversy about the health benefits of dairy products, our
position at the Chopra Center is that as long as you don’t have allergies, consuming organic, low-fat dairy products in moderation has a balancing effect and enhances the experience of the six tastes.
• If you are not vegetarian, minimize your intake of red meat, favoring cold-water fish and lean poultry. Keep in mind the eye-opening findings from 2013 about the benefits of a Mediterranean diet for reducing heart disease and strokes. This widely publicized study, conducted in Spain, doesn’t claim that a Mediterranean diet reverses heart disease, but rather that it markedly decreased the incidence of heart attacks and strokes compared to the control group, who were told simply to reduce their calories. A Mediterranean diet is high in fish, nuts, fresh fruits and vegetables, and olive oil, with a corresponding decrease in butter, cheese, and red meat compared with the average American diet.
• Favor fats and oils derived from vegetable and fish sources. Your cooking oils should be either monounsaturated, such as olive oil, or polyunsaturated, such as canola, safflower, or sunflower. A small amount of butter (less than 1 tablespoon per day) adds sweet flavor with an acceptable dose of cholesterol.
Help for a Serious Sweet Tooth
Of all the tastes, sweet is the one people most frequently crave. This may be because sweetness has the most settling effect, going back to nursing at the breast. If you crave sweets, make sure that your diet is thoroughly balanced and that you include all six tastes prepared in a delicious way. Completeness is satisfying on its own, far more than a fix of sugar.
If you’re eating the six tastes every day and still have sugar cravings, recognize that the desire for a splurge arises from conditioning,
much of it social and almost all from childhood. Be easy with yourself as you change any long-term habit. Don’t be fanatical about never eating refined sugar—cutting back from the hundred-plus pounds of white sugar in the average American diet is a major accomplishment without reaching total abstinence. As you’ve probably experienced, whenever you repress a desire and go to extremes to be “pure,” there is an inevitable backlash.
One food that can help stop sugar cravings is milk. Milk contains the sweet taste and has a settling effect on the entire physiology in adults, not just infants. If you constantly hanker for sweets and are not vegan, try drinking a cup of warm milk, perhaps as part of your breakfast. You can also use honey to reduce cravings for sweets. Try drinking a cup of warm water with a teaspoon of honey and a squirt of lemon.
Tips for Sugar Cravings
If you find yourself with a major craving for sugar, there are specific tactics you can try.
• Don’t eat sugary snacks, like sodas, doughnuts, or candy bars on their own. A jolt of sugar makes your craving worse; it also has the most drastic effect on insulin and blood sugar spikes. Wait until lunch or dinner, when other food groups can buffer the effects of the sugar.
• Try weaning yourself off sugar. For a snack, slice up an apple or other fruit and sprinkle a teaspoon of sugar or honey on top. You will get an intense sugary taste, but the actual amount of sugar ingested will be minimal, and the whole fruit will help buffer it.
• Don’t use artificial sweeteners. You may think you are fooling your body with a diet soda, but just the taste is enough to alter your blood sugar and stoke the craving for more sugar.
• Wait
10 minutes before ordering dessert in a restaurant. Have a cup of coffee or tea, or distract yourself with good conversation. Giving your body a chance to register that it isn’t hungry goes a long way toward making sugar cravings subside.
• Before you give yourself a fix of sugar, stop, close your eyes, and wait a moment. Ask if you really want to make this choice. If not, the craving will often pass naturally. Even if you give yourself a fix, keep repeating this exercise. The more you give yourself a chance to make the right choice, the higher your rate of success.
If you eat moderately, with awareness, you won’t find yourself inhaling a box of cookies despite your best intentions. A few dessert recipes are included at the end of the book, and if you restrict dessert to one or two times a week, your body will easily bounce back into its state of balance. In any event, make the sweet taste a source of pleasure, without attaching the word
guilty.
Sour
Sources:
Foods ranging from feta cheese to vinegar carry the sour taste; the best sources are fresh fruits, including apples, apricots, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, cherries, grapefruit, grapes, lemons, oranges, pineapples, and tomatoes. Organic yogurt is a good source of the sour taste and provides acidophilus bacteria, which are helpful in balancing the digestive tract.