Good health

Methods of eating food:

One should eat with a calm, pleasant and relaxed mind. It is not good to take or serve food when the mind is filled with grief, anger, excitement, pain or negative thoughts. During such moments the glands secreting digestive juices get dried and hence the juices essential for digestion are not make available for the food intake. It is well known that during excitement of any kind one does not feel hungry. This also proves that during that time body is not ready to take food. Thus one should eat with a cool and pleasant mind chewing each morsel thoroughly before swallowing it. There should be no hungry. The task of the teeth is to grind the food and the task of stomach and intestines is to digest the same. If the teeth do not grind the morsel properly and it is swallowed half-ground, the work of teeth has to be done by the stomach and the intestines and in this process they are overburdened. There are small glands in the mouth which secret digestive juices while chewing the morsel. If these juices are not made available to the food, it will be difficult to digest the food. According to Ayurveda, each morsel should be chewed thirty two times before swallowing it. In practice, such a counting is difficult. Nevertheless, one must pay attention to grind the morsel thoroughly before swallowing it. Daliya, Halua, Khir etc should also be chewed properly. They should not be drunk like water. Even milk or water too should not be consumed in one go. Rather they should be taken sip by sip retaining them in the mouth for some time.

Considering food as Amrit (nectar) and Prasad (food offered to God), one should eat it with joy and respect. It is a bad habit to get angry or find faults in food on slight reduction in taste or flavor. Food taken with ill-will, hatred, attribution of fault, disrespect etc generated disorders. Thus instead of producing a beneficial effect, it proves to be harmful to health. Even if a simple food is taken with gratitude, considering it to be nutritious and healthy, it will certainly be digested fast and will also produce pure blood.

Quantity item of food:

One should eat less than the hunger. Everybody's food intake and the digestive power are different. The same quantity of food cannot be prescribed for all. This decision has to be taken by the stomach of a person consuming food. The stomach tells what the requirement of the body is and what its digestive power is. We should provide whatever it asks for. Ayurvedic scriptures say that the stomach should be filled hold with food and half should be left empty (one fourth portion for water and remaining one fourth for air) Indeed it is difficult to do such measurements, but it must be kept in mind that food intake should be less than the hunger and some space should be left in the stomach. One should not eat so much that after meals, it becomes difficult to work or move around. One should feel refreshed and energetic after meals. But if laziness or heaviness is felt it should be understood that it is due to overeating. There is no harm if the food is taken in lesser quantity; rather it is beneficial because it is digested easily. The stomach has to work very harm to process heavy food. The bile present in the gall bladder falls short for assisting in the digestion. Hence food is excreted as half-digested faces. Therefore, it must be kept in kind that one should eat less than the full capacity of the stomach. The dinner should be taken 2-3 hours prior to sleeping. Sleeping immediately after dinner produces indigestion and also disturbs sound sleep.

Keeping in mind what to eat, how and when to eat and how much to eat; and acting accordingly removes all complaints regarding malfunctioning of stomach. This also removes constipation and strengthens the digestive system as a whole.