White flour too has the same effect. And has one more trick up its sleeve. It coats the inner lining of the intestine with a fine layer, preventing the absorption of nutrients from the food you consume. If you have too much white flour in your system, very soon, even if you are eating the healthiest food in the world, your body will become incapable of assimilating it.
All this seems to be giving carbs a bad rep and there are many ‘experts’ who recommend a low or no carb diet. Remember that Carbs = Energy and such a diet will mean very little energy and make you feel defeated, frustrated, angry and exhausted.
It is quite interesting to note that the exact same system that feeds fat cells in our bodies can make the body muscular and lean as well. The insulin takes the sugar to the muscles first: if you have exercised, the muscles will be tired and want that energy boost they get from the carbs. Most of your carbs will be absorbed right there. The same carbs that can make you fat can make you muscular if you have exercised and eaten the food at the right time.
You must eat carbs. All carbs are not created equal. Just make sure you eat the right type of carb.
Good carbs are made up of (three or more) molecules of sugar, starch and fibre. In case you are wondering what starch is, it is the compacted form of plant sugar. The longer sugar molecules in plant sugar can be prone to meandering lengths and get a little out of hand. If they were not compressed, a potato would be the size of a dog, or perhaps an elephant. Just like we compress bigger files into zipped files when we want to send stuff over the internet, nature zips up sugar to keep things manageable. This zipped file of sugar is called starch.
The fibre is not digestible; it gives bulk to food increasing the feeling of satiety. It helps in moving the food along the digestive tract.
Whole grains are cereals that contain the endosperm, germ and bran compared to refined grains which are stripped of the germ and bran and retain only the endosperm.
Whole grains contain the seed of life itself and boast of tremendous vitality and energy. Did you know that these unrefined, unprocessed grains don’t spoil for over a thousand years?! Brown rice, whole wheat, whole grain barley, quinoa, whole oats and other such cereals are amazing complex carbs and must be included in every diet.
All refined, processed, deep fried or milled fare are simple carbs. These release sugar very quickly into the blood causing sugar spikes and lay the foundation for terrible health.
Placating Your Sweet Tooth
Do not use any sort of artificial sweetener. Those are dangerous and will swiftly create life-threatening consequences.
Watch out for things like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), corn syrup and other unpronounceable stuff on the ingredients list of whatever you buy to sweeten your food. These are all gobbledygook of sugar.
Organic coconut or palm sugar is a sweetener better than normal sugar but definitely not as good as no sugar. When a recipe calls for sugar, these sugars can be used in almost the same quantity as regular sugar and many people find that very convenient.
Fruit pulp and juices are great sweeteners. Banana pulp, apple sauce and berry juices give distinctive flavours to your desserts.
Dates and raisins pulped or simply tossed into your milkshake instead of sugar are quite nice.
I love the taste of maple syrup in my food. Just make sure that it has not been adulterated with other noxious additives. Simple, plain organic maple syrup is best. There is some research that says that the darker varieties of maple syrup may be better than the lighter golden type.
Stevia is considered to be one of the best sweeteners ever. It loses a few points because it leaves a little bit of an after taste. Stevia can be between 100-200 times sweeter than regular sugar, so you require a tiny bit of it to sweeten quite a big batch of dessert. Don’t use the powdered variety, use the tincture or dried stevia leaf.
Jaggery is typically Indian. We have not seen it anywhere else in the world. It is a fabulous sweetener, and many Indian sweets can easily be made with jaggery instead of white sugar. Ensure that you use the organic, non-processed variety. The darker the jaggery, the better it is. As children we would get a huge piece of it as a reward for finishing all the food on our plates. . . I still have a piece after almost every meal.
Honey has been used since times immemorial to sweeten food. Honey doesn’t spoil. Jars of it have been found in Egyptian tombs and is still edible. It has been mentioned many times in the Vedic scriptures. Make sure the honey is raw; not boiled and pasteurised. There are quite a few health benefits of having two to three tablespoons of raw honey every day. Most commercial brands available are not raw. Beware of these. They are sugar masquerading as honey. Use different types of honey; don’t stick to just one variety.
There are many who believe that honey is perhaps the best and healthiest way to sweeten food.
Protection and Survival
Other than Sumo wrestlers, no one I know of wants to be fat. Yet fat is an essential member of the trinity of macro nutrients. Our bodies are bags within bags within bags within bags. The entire body is contained in the first bag which we call the skin, followed by the fascia, then deep fascia and muscle (and bone) coats and finally organ cavities in which the organs reside. In between each of these bags is fat. All organs are enveloped in fat. Fat ensures smooth and lubricated movements of the body. It protects delicate organs from the shock waves which routinely happen when we move. It keeps everything where it’s supposed to be—for example, ensuring that your kidneys don’t end up somewhere near your knees every time you jog.
When an infection poses a threat, the body isolates it by cleverly coating it with a layer of fat. The body’s defence system then gets to work to eliminate it. Fat plays an important role in surviving infectious attacks.
Fat protects.
Our brain is nearly 60% fat. A form of fat called lipids, very different from fat cells, but fat none the less. We learn and remember better when our neural pathways are myelinated. Myelination is medicalese for ‘coating of fat.’
The fat cells in our bodies are storehouses of energy reserved for emergencies. Fat is a smart evolutionary move. Our bodies evolved over hundreds of thousands of years. Most of the time we have spent on this planet has seen severe shortage of food. Our bodies had to get energy wherever and whenever they could and learn to store it for tough times.
Hence, the fat cell: Energy for Emergencies.
The Battle of the Bulge
My father, thank God, has saved and invested money for my sister and me all through his life. I have been signing various complicated documents every now and then. He has forever been telling me, I would get this money when I am older.
Recently, when I turned 49, I asked him how much older was I supposed to get before I got that money. He said, ‘Don’t worry. You will get it when I die.’ I said, ‘That’s no fun. . . I want to see your face when I spend it!’ The next day, I got yet another document to sign.
Our bodies’ attitude towards storing emergency reserves of energy in the form of fat is the same as my dad’s approach with money. If it comes in, it’s not going anywhere. That’s it!
Our bodies’ evolution has not yet caught up with the age of plenty that we are living in.
You starve the body and you are reinforcing its evolutionary insecurity about lack of food. It will stubbornly hold on to fat. If it is forced into burning those reserves, it will stock pile them at the next opportunity. The battle of the bulge would continue with no hope of victory. You know why most of those shed-your-fat diets don’t work for too long, and why as soon as you are off the diet, the fat boomerangs back with a vengeance.
For the body to let go of fat, it needs to be convinced that there is enough food for it to survive and that it will receive it at regular intervals. The survival instinct of our body makes it super possessive about fat.
Fat loss has to happen gradually. The body will automatically let go of its fat reserves once it is convinced that food is readily available. But how d
o we convince it?
There was a time I used to suffer from terrible acidity. I’d get a burning sensation in my food pipe throughout the day, accompanied by those disgusting undigested food burps. I tried all sorts of medicines and cures for this. Ayurveda, allopathy, homeopathy, massage, reflexology. . . Nothing worked for more than a week.
I discussed my problem with a doctor friend of mine, who simply advised me to eat on time. ‘If you have breakfast at 7 a.m., you need to have it every day between 6.55 a.m. and 7.05 a.m. The same goes for your lunch and dinner. Wrap up your dinner before 8 p.m.’
I rationalised to him for 15 minutes about why I couldn’t follow all this. My courses start at 7 p.m., I said. I couldn’t walk out of them in the middle of the pranayamas to eat dinner. Plus, I travel a lot, and have plenty of late nights. . .
He patiently listened to my soliloquy. When I finished, he leaned back in his chair and said, Ok, then suffer.
I cleaned up my food habits and meal times from the very next day. Within a month, my acidity drastically reduced, and in three months all symptoms had vanished. It felt fantastic.
Another amazing thing happened to me because of eating on time. Over the next few months, I shed about 5 kilos of weight, which was mostly fat. While I failed to see a connection back then, I now know what had happened. I ate good food, fastidiously sticking to my meal times for a few months. This must have convinced my body that there was plenty of food and it was regularly available. The evolutionary insecurity had been wiped out. My body, at first grudgingly, and then quite enthusiastically, let go of the ugly fat around my middle. I was actually winning the battle of the bulge as a happy by-product of fighting my acidity.
Though I have presented a strong case for fat, it doesn’t mean you need oodles of it. A little bit in between each of the ‘bags’ is more than enough. Extra fat will burden the various systems of your body and invite rapidly declining health.
Bad fat or trans-fat clogs arteries and can lead to heart attacks and stroke. It makes you look ugly and saps confidence. The only way to burn fat is to eat fat. The type that lubricates and protects, and in small, controlled quantities. Picture protecting the flame of a burning diya by adding tiny bits of fat everywhere.
Eat on time. Eat controlled quantities of good quality fat. Throw some exercise and meditation into the mix and, in time, you will begin to look good and feel great. For sure, you will smile more!
Building Blocks
Think Lego blocks. That’s protein.
The basic building blocks of life are protein. Protein is what everything is made of in our bodies. Structures in our bodies are being regenerated all the time. For the regeneration to happen, we would need certain pieces to replaces those that are failing. These pieces are created by the body using protein.
Proteins themselves are made up of individual amino acids. NH2 makes up the amine or amino part and COOH is the carboxylic acid group. Various proteins are just chains of these two groups in different permutations and combinations. The protein required to regenerate tendons is different from that needed to rebuild muscle, which would be different from the protein required to renew the bone and so on.
There are 22 amino acids that the body requires as its Lego blocks. Think of these as Lego blocks in various sizes that the body would use to renew or replace parts of itself. Of these 22, 9 are considered to be essential. Essential simply means the body cannot synthesise these and they need to come from the food we eat. There is a tenth one that is required during childhood in the phase of rapid growth. Though the body can make it, it cannot make enough of it during that time, and so it needs to be supplemented by eating.
The body doesn’t store protein, so it is imperative to make sure you get enough of it through food. Likewise, because the body doesn’t store protein, if you eat too much, it will just be excreted. But not before it has been broken down into usable form (converted to carbs or lipids or oxidised), which is a tremendous amount of work for the body. It would be like buying the 7441-piece $1000 Lego set with which you can make the huge Millennium Falcon space ship from Star Wars (utterly drool-worthy btw, wouldn’t mind getting it as a birthday present) and using about 100 pieces to make a tiny house and throwing the rest away!
Too much protein would mean a huge waste of resources and energy just to create poo. Too little would mean bone and muscle degeneration.
How much is enough?
Experts haven’t come to an agreement about this. Approximately 25% of your meal should be good proteins. You may increase this by about 5% if you are actively exercising.
I would go with plant protein instead of animal protein any day. Eating vegetarian food is good for your body, fantastic for the planet and a winning strategy in the long run. We have talked at length about this in our previous book Ready, Study, Go! and on our blog www.bawandinesh.in.
Watch my video ‘Make the Moon Smile’ (www.happinessexpressbook.com/videos/makethemoonsmile) for more information about why choosing a plant-based diet is just the right thing to do.
Vitamins and Minerals
Vitamins and minerals are required in trace quantities to keep certain very specific functions of the body going. When they are present in the right amounts, you don’t feel much, everything is humming along smoothly. Their deficiencies, however, can create all sorts of complications. With vitamins and minerals, it can get extremely technical or remain very simple. Let’s keep it simple.
For each meal have many colours of food on your plate.
All the six tastes—sweet, sour, salty, bitter, pungent and astringent—should make an appearance at least once in a day.
Make sure you get about an hour of sunlight every day. Sunlight will stimulate Vitamin D production in your body. However, contrary to popular belief, this doesn’t happen as efficiently in the early mornings or late evenings. The sun needs to be at an angle of at least 50o above the horizon (90o is directly above) for reaching its greatest potential of stimulating Vitamin D production. A good way to test this is to check the length of your shadow. If your shadow is shorter than you, the sun is in the perfect position to get your body to produce significant amounts of Vitamin D. Of course, you need to make sure that you have exposed enough of your skin while you are in the sun to create that Vitamin D.
Eat a little bit of dairy—some A2 milk or products made from A2 milk like yogurt, ghee or butter.
Following these four steps will ensure you have all the vitamins and minerals you require.
Many people believe that animal flesh or secretions (milk) have Vitamin B12 and it is absent in a completely plant-based diet. While it is true that plants are not a source of B12, neither are animals. B12 is made by anaerobic bacteria (these don’t need oxygen for survival) in the soil, and is found in dirt and soil where these bacteria grow. For thousands of years, humans got their supply of B12 by eating plants that still had some bits of soil on them. Animals get it the same way and that’s how it finds its way into the milk and the flesh.
These days, we wash our fruits and veggies thoroughly which is a great thing to do—but it removes all the B12 from them. In this case, B12 supplementation may be the way to go for strict vegans.
Some people could have severe deficiencies that may require supplements. Seek a professional’s help for this.
Having some pre- and probiotic supplement may be a good idea. A prebiotic creates a good environment for the nice bacteria in your gut. A probiotic will add millions and millions of the good guys to your microbiome.
Please consult an expert for more information about this.
Good Food to Eat
Now that you know the fundamentals of food, you might be wondering which foods are better than others and what macro- or micro-nutrient they provide. Read on. . .
Great Carbs
Oats (old fashioned or steel cut), unpolished and unrefined whole grain rice (brown, red or black varieties are way better than white), quinoa, couscous, amaranth (raajgira or raamdaana), buckwheat (koot
u), sorghum (jowar), barley, spelt are all super grains loaded with complex carbs. Some grains like quinoa and spelt are rich in protein too.
Veggies like sweet potatoes, pumpkin, butternut squash, beet and tomatoes are rich sources of complex carbs. Did you know that tomatoes are 95% water?!
Apples, bananas, mangoes, grapes, papayas, blueberries, blackberries, acai berries, strawberries, watermelons, oranges, peaches, pears and pineapples pack in loads of vitamins and minerals along with healthy doses of good carbs.
Powerful Proteins
Nuts and seeds of all types—walnuts, almonds, pecans, pine nuts, sunflower, pumpkin and flax seeds—are superb sources of protein.
Tofu (firmer tofu means more protein), seitan, tempeh, horse gram, beans—chickpeas, kidney beans, pinto beans and black beans, all lentils, chia seeds, edamame, asparagus, broccoli, spinach, artichokes, kale, brussels sprouts, bok choy, zucchini, carrots, green beans, green peas and spirulina pack quite a protein punch.
Fantastic Fats
The healthiest fat you could have is from A2 milk from the Indian desi cow. Ghee and butter made from the milk of breeds like the Gir cow, an ancient breed dating back to Lord Krishna’s time, are rocking sources of good fat.
Coconuts and coconut oil, avocados and avocado oil, and olives and olive oil are next on my list of great fats to have. The oils should be extra virgin and cold pressed—no refining or heating of any sort. Coconut oil, avocado oil and ghee are good for frying. They have very high smoking points.
My most favourite source of good fat is dark chocolate. 70% or more is fantastic. One or two squares a day is enough. You could add dark cacao nibs to your smoothie or shake.
Good quality organic fresh and aged cheeses are amazing sources of fat and protein. Make sure they are vegetarian and use vegetarian rennet.
Happiness Express Page 10