Food.
Yesterday – none of it. Today – too much of it.
Yesterday was Ekādashi, and as usual, I fasted the whole day and night, with water and a banana when I felt the pangs.
Today, as usual, I woke up and broke the fast with simple food that I cooked myself, and then had lunch and dinner outside (had accepted a friend’s invite for lunch, and then another one’s for dinner).
Needless to say, am stuffed. So tomorrow it’s mostly going to be a quasi-ekādashi again.
Which got me thinking on how we as humans have evolved as far as our dietary habits go. We were hunter-gatherers, and ate what we were able to hunt (or gather), and for which we had to traverse large distances, with a chance of not finding anything at the end of it. A meal, maximum two per day. Translated – lot of exercise, and lesser food.
Today, we hunt online and gather Zomato coupons. We eat three times a day as a given, and snack in between for good measure. And then go “sweat it out” in a gym on a treadmill, traveling by car and back. Translated – too much food and too less exercise.
A good part of the millions of years of our existence have been spent as hunter-gatherers, and this new found prosperity is well, newly found. Bodies don’t evolve over a hundred years, they take millions.
In short, we have a problem. And no diet can fix that. We are built to be mobile, not sedentary. And to eat twice a day, that too, only when hungry. And not to eat processed food, sugars, excess dairy, and the truckload of tablets that we push down our throats every year. To much meat, too much sugar, too much food.
And so humankind needs a change in thinking, not a change in food.
Try this out for yourself. Eat twice a day, as less processed food as possible, and exercise naturally – walks, jogs, body weight exercises. First meal after sunrise, or around 10, and second meal before sunset, around 6.30. Tell me how you feel in 10-12 days.
Stage two will be exercise. But no use exercising if the basic inputs are faulty, isn’t it?
See you tomorrow!