“What type of food we should eat
so that our life reaches its full potential
for a college or a school going student” and it’s by Spoorthi.
Sadhguru: Oh!
(Laughs) Well,
we must understand this
- food is not a religion, food is not a culture,
food is just a fuel for this machine.
Yes?
There may be cultural aspects to the taste.
There may be even religious tinge to the food
over a period of time
but essentially food is fuel for this body.
So with what kind of food will it function
with minimum struggle within itself
and maximum impact?
So suppose you buy a petrol car
and pump diesel into it, it may still roll around
but not at its optimum.
Similarly, various foods you can eat
and still somehow it functions
but those communities
which have eaten with care,
you can clearly see a distinct difference
in the way they function,
the levels of intelligence and whatever.
So in India, we prescribed food
for different people in different way.
If you are doing menial jobs,
you eat one way because you need physical muscle.
If you are doing other kinds of trading and other kinds of activities,
you eat another way.
If you are a fighting class, you eat differently.
And now if you are into education,
spiritual process and subtler aspects of life,
then you eat differently.
Now that you mentioned students,
I believe you are in education.
Yes?
If you are in education,
one of the greatest challenges is to stay focused on something.
The Goddamn textbook…
I’m sorry (Laughter).
The wonderful textbook (Laughter)
that is written, is written for an average intelligence,
it’s a common prescription.
It’s not written for the brilliant student.
It is written in a way that it’s a common prescription.
Everybody gets it.
But that textbook
how much effort it is taking for a whole lot of people!
How they have to read it ten times to get it
but you lie down in your bed and read a love story,
you remember every word (Laughter).
Yes or no?
How come?
So you don’t lack memory, you don’t lack focus.
It is just that textbook and you,
chemistry is not working (Laughs).
So what you need is a higher level of focus,
a higher level of involvement and
another great enemy for a student is because this textbook is such a tranquilizer.
The moment you open it (Gestures) (Laughter).
Go to cinema till 2 AM, you are up.
Open the textbook, at 9 o’clock (Gestures)(Laughter).
Right there, you smash into it (Laughs).
So sleep is another big enemy.
So what kind of food do you eat
so there is no inertia in the body?
In yogic way of seeing things,
we are looking at tamas, rajas and sattva.
Tamas means inertia,
rajas means activity but no balance,
sattva means absolutely balanced kind of energy.
When you are in education,
you need a very balanced kind of energy
because you have to focus on something
which doesn’t naturally interest you.
It’s not something that with which your chemistry is gelling.
If your chemistry is gelling,
you are always focused on that one, isn’t it?
Here there is no chemistry,
but you have to focus on that.
For this you need a balance and a steady mind.
For this you need to eat in a certain way.
I will make this very simple
but if you want
I can send you a full-fledged video,
where all of you can see for maybe
forty-five minutes to an hour
- what is food and how it works in your system,
how it relates to your physiology,
why food behaves the way it behaves
and entire system of it.
But to put it very simply,
food goes through your body through the alimentary canal.
From your mouth to your anal outlet, there is a pipe.
Through this it runs,
going through various stages of digestive process.
Many of you are biology people, right ?
It goes through the alimentary canal.
Now it begins with the… the lip.
Here, if you look at this,
all the herbivores and carnivores.
If you look at the animal kingdom,
there are herbivores and carnivores are
two main segments of animals in the world.
One eats vegetable matter, another eats meat.
If you look at the alimentary canal,
the way it is built, between herbivores and carnivores
there’s a distinct difference.
Everything in the human being suggests that you are naturally a herbivore
but for the sake of survival we became carnivores.
If you look at the movement,
jaw movement,
all the carnivorous animals have only cutting action,
herbivores have cutting and grinding action.
There are molars
but carnivores don’t have widespread molars.
They have just incisors, canines,
everything looks like cutting teeth.
So they do only this.
All the herbivores do grinding.
What do you have?
Both.
So you are supposed to chew your food.
Why you are supposed to chew your food is you have enzymes in your saliva,
where if you take a little bit of raw rice
and put it in your mouth just for a minute,
you will see it turns sweet right here
because right here
carbohydrate is being converted into sugar, right here.
So if you eat properly,
then we say about
thirty to fifty percent of your digestion should happen in your mouth.
So this (Gestures) part of the digestive system is expecting half-digested food or
partially digested food
but right now the way we’re eating is mostly
we are putting not only undigested food
but partially destroyed food.
So the amount of food
that you need to get
the same amount of energy has increased.
You are eating much more food than
what you should eat to generate that much of energy.
Because of that,
there is inertia in the body
- because it has to process so much more food
than what it should, there is inertia.
Once there is inertia, your sleep quota increases.
How many hours do you sleep?
Hello?
Eight hours?
You are going by the prescription, hmm?
See, this is not that you must deny yourself sleep,
that’s not the point.
But if you eat right
and do a certain things with your body,
you see very effortlessly within three to four weeks,
you can drop your sleep quota
anywhere between two to three hours.
One-and-a-half to three hours very easily
you can drop if you just eat consciously and
just learn to sit properly.
You know?
Just the posture.
Your geometry of the body
and what goes into the system,
if you just manage these two things,
you will see sleep quota will just come down like that.
Just to tell you,
for over twenty-five years,
I have largely managed with an average of two- and-a-half hours of sleep.
Now I am getting lazy
and I am sleeping averaging
somewhere around four-and-a-half hours now
but seven days of the week, okay?
Three-hundred-and-sixty-five days
non-stop on, on, on almost every day.
My daughter didn’t call me for a month.
I asked “What the hell is the problem with you,
why are you not calling?”
She said, “Every six hours you are in a new city.
What the hell I am supposed to do?”
I said, “Okay”…which is true (Laughs).
In one day sometimes we are doing three cities.
So it’s a non-stop activity
and today
many people around me have learned to do this.
Over a hundred,
hundred-and-fifty people around me are doing this kind of activity
averaging four hours sleep and seven days of the week.
They are on, on, on,
all the time and they are not irritated,
they are not frustrated.
They are joyful and they’re wonderful.
Why this is,
is - there are many aspects to this
but one important aspect is food - how you eat.
Not only what you eat,
how you eat is also very important
because food is a live thing.
One simple thing all you girls can do is -
just see various health issues and inertia issue,
focus issue,
just bring forty to fifty percent of the food in its raw form.
That means it’s alive, it must be a live cell.
It can be a vegetable, it can be a fruit,
it can be a nut, it can be sprouted gram.
At least forty to fifty percent,
the food that you eat must be alive.
You eat dead food and you want to live -
this is a little difficult thing to do
because you have to raise the dead now (Laughs).
But if you eat live food,
one thing you will see is the state of your mind,
your focus and your sleep quotas
and above all staying awake is not good enough.
You have to stay alert, isn’t it?
How alert you are,
how focused you are,
only to that extent
everything yields to you in this world, isn’t it so?
What is the level of focus will determine
whether the world yields to you or not, isn’t it?
And one more aspect of life,
one more aspect of food is
- when you consume something,
it must of a simple genetic code, in the sense
- it must be a very simple software.
Vegetables, fruits, nuts, sprouts
- they are very simple.
More complicated means
animal food becomes more and more complicated.
Suppose you eat an animal,
which has some amount of emotion
and a life of its own.
Now, the code in that…
We were talking about this,
your body is just an accumulation of memory,
which means a certain software, isn’t it?
This is the most complex software
– human software is the most complex software
on the planet of all the creatures.
From an amoeba to this (Referring to oneself),
this is the most complex (Gestures),
I am not talking about her.
She is looking… “oh yes, yes” and she…
(Laughter) This is the most (Gestures)…
This (Gestures) is safe, hmm?
This is the most complex software.
So if you eat an animal,
particularly a mammal
if you eat, it has a similar kind of complexity
- maybe not as complex as this
- similar level of complexity
because it has thought and emotion of its own.
Now for you to
break that code and integrate it into your system,
you are not fully successful.
So it will leave traces of certain qualities within you
otherwise the best food would be eat a human flesh because it’s same.
But you cannot break that...
you cannot break that code and
make it a part of yours
because it’s a different and complex code.
If you eat a leaf, a vegetable, a fruit,
a nut or a sprout - this is much simpler.
If you must eat non-vegetarian food,
you must eat that which is furtherest away from you.
So generally fish and water life is furtherest away from you.
So, if you must eat non-vegetarian food,
the best thing to eat is
- you have a… you are on the coast (Laughter),
fish is the best thing to eat that way.
Interviewer: Thank you, Sadhguru.