Yoga Health Secrets

A healthy vegetarian diet for Yoga

What, then, are these unnatural foods to be avoided? These are the refined, processed, tinned and packaged foods, the worst offenders being white sugar, white flour, white rice and any other food from which the vitality has been refined out. Pickles, preserves, sweets and over-salted foods should be avoided, as should anything containing artificial ingredients. This, 1 know, is not easy if one tends to eat out a great deal. Well-meaning relations and friends hand us heavily iced sweet cakes and sandwiches made with that unwholesome substance, white bread. What can one do to avoid complete social ostracism? That is a problem which you can work out for yourselves, according to your individual circumstances but to all of you I would say this, avoid these foods wherever possible but do not, in the process, offend anyone. Rather eat a piece of cake than hurt someone’s feelings. You can leave most of it in crumbs on your plate without arousing suspicion.

The three main rules of the Yoga diet are (1) non-violence, (2) moderation, and (3) attitude of mind. Non-violence I have already discussed. What then of moderation ? You must train yourself to eat only what you need and no more. As you proceed with your studies of Yoga you will find yourself taking less interest in food and more interest in spiritual matters. Food no longer becomes a break from the round of work. It becomes a time of refueling the body so that it may continue to flourish. Remember to chew each mouthful slowly which simple practice will gradually accustom you to taking only as much food as you need, not as much as you think you want. By all means enjoy your food but take it in moderation.

And what of attitude of mind? It is not necessary for you to become cranks and food faddists who measure every mouthful you eat. It is not necessary for you to set up a hue and cry about the needless slaughter of animals for food. Quietly pursue your own course, eat only what is pure and natural and your influence will be far greater on those around you than by any more noisy methods.

I am by no means deaf to the many arguments against vegetarianism that are hurled at me from time to time. They go as follows. If everyone became a vegetarian we should be completely overrun by animals. That without eating flesh our diet becomes dull and uninteresting. That the vegetarian diet is not filling and the amount of food one has to consume to satisfy one’s hunger tends to make one gain weight. That one becomes socially ‘difficult’ and eating out becomes something of a problem. That the fancy health food shops are much more expensive than the other food shops. These are the main objections although there are many more. Let us demolish each one in turn. Firstly the danger of us being overrun by animals if everyone became a vegetarian. Not true, for the simple reason that animals raised for commercial slaughter are artificially bred to multiply at a greater rate than is natural. If it became unprofitable to breed animals the number of them would be drastically decreased by introducing alternate breeding methods.

From the economic standpoint, if everyone became a vegetarian the area of land used to graze animals for food could be used to raise anything from four to forty times as much vegetable food. Meat is actually no more than very expensive, secondhand, vegetable food. It is a known fact that vegetable foods can be produced much more economically than flesh foods.