"The following is the excerpt from personal diary of a naturopathy practioner who is impressed with oilpulling.com"
The very words “natural food” dishearten many at once. They think it is tasteless and completely unappealing because it lacks salt, oil, seasoning, chilies or spiciness. Innocently ask - How one can eat just boiled vegetables? Is it worth living with such food? Were humans not born to enjoy delicious foods? Of course you can’t be blamed for that. All along you have followed the credo, “Variety is the spice of life” and enjoyed food of various types and flavors. Consider this crucial fact: if you get sick, your body faces problems. It cannot accept the spicy food as before, but the heart longs for spicy food (with salt, oil, ghee, spices) and demands foods with much more salt. If you fulfill the desires of your heart, slowly all the parts of your body will decay and this body vehicle of yours will go beyond use. Finally it will be made only of various lifeless parts. At this stage you go to doctors; they treat you only your various parts and tell you to give up many tastes and to take medicines forever. If you don’t give up tastes, neither the treatment nor the medicines are useful. As a result you will be in very bad shape. You follow treatment on one side and the restricted diet on the other. You can neither be happy nor unhappy; you are neither very healthy nor very seriously ill. And, you can neither live peacefully nor die peacefully. You pass your problems to others and make others’ lives miserable. You will ultimately arrive at the conclusion that living is the real hell and long for heaven after death.
You know why all these problems crop up in your life? For one simple reason: you are unable to control your urges. If you go to the doctor, you should follow his diet restrictions as well as take his medicines. But are you really cured of your diseases? No. The doctor benefits from your sickness. So with Allopathy, no matter what you do, you are never assured of good health. On the other hand, with Naturopathy you follow only diet restrictions; you don’t take a single medicine but are completely assured of good health. It promises a cure from chronic diseases. Decide for yourself! The food here may be tasteless, but it aims at perfect health. Chronic patients, who go to nature cure hospitals, follow the diet restrictions strictly and get relief from disease. After some time, few of them go back to their earlier habits. Consequently, their diseases also come back to them at once. Day by day the number of patients, diseases, medicines, doctors, and hospitals are increasing. Such a rapid parasitic growth is not good for any country. From such diseases, our family, our society, our nation and finally we suffer gravely. If we so desire, we could concentrate on a food that gives us both good taste and good health. We should pray to God for that. If we genuinely pray, God is always eager and ready to help. He will send somebody to help us. It is the Dharma.
Whatever desire we may have, if it is a good desire, it will be fulfilled. After you are settled for natural food, there may be a moment when you feel like having tasty food for a change. You will suggest the lady of the house to add a pinch of salt, and she will add a bit more and make a normal curry. Taking only a pinch of salt, a little bit of spice, or two drops of oil will not end with that day. Before you know it, you’ll be back on your normal diet. For instance, you were once a chain smoker and gave it up forever. But if you are tempted to have a smoke for a day or two, you know how it works. You will end up smoking regularly. The dividing line disappears without your knowledge. Our desire is for good health. If we really want it, we should completely give up salt, oil and spices and bring about a revolution in our eating habit. The natural food we eat should be easy to make and tasty to relish.
At the same time, it should help curing the sick and benefit the healthy that believe in prevention than a cure. I experimented making curries with that aim in mind. It worked out, and my wish is fulfilled. The new curries smell pleasant, attractive to look at, good to eat, and easy to cook! In addition to curries, you can prepare quite a variety of foods in less time and with less expenditure. They give you extra time and energy in your busy day. They don’t give birth to new diseases; on the contrary, they act as preventive medicines. Eating them won’t bother you, and they will brighten your mind. They are useful for all age groups, helpful even to manual workers and last but not least, make you perform better at work.
Are you surprised at this long list? Do you think I am exaggerating? No. If you really taste this new menu, you will discover for yourself more important information I missed. See, it is a chain reaction. If you wish to understand it, you should experience it; if you have to experience it, you should begin it. If you want to begin it, you should develop the desire to follow it. To have the desire, you should first know all about it. So come on! Learn about this new way to prepare your food. There are seven flavorings. They are salt, oil, ghee, sweet, sour, hot and spices. Any variety of food preparation springs out of these seven basic flavors. Without these seven there is no taste, but without these seven there are no diseases either. From these seven flavorings spring an infinite number of diseases.
To please our taste buds, we distort the natural food provided by God. The diseases in our body are directly proportionate to the quantity of these seven tastes. When you give up these seven, you have conquered the whole world. You can eat happily. You can live and let others around you live happily. Now let us look at the substitutes to the harmful seven tastes: Salt: Every edible item created by God has some pinch of salt in it. In fact, our bodies need only a small quantity of salt and every item that we eat contains inherently more than the required quantity. The creator of our body, God, knows very well what we need, so He has taken care that we should not miss any of them. That’s why He has provided natural salt in every food and that’s why we don’t need to add further salt through our food.
Then you may ask why your tongue does not taste this salt in our natural food. It is because your tongue has become so used to salt that it no longer tastes the lesser quantity. If you are accustomed to drinking strong coffee, can’t you tell the difference at once if the brew is weak? The same principle is applicable here also. If you don’t add salt to your food for three or four months, your tongue will be able to identify the salt in vegetables and fruits. In place of salt, you can add any of these to make your food tasty – milk, curds, coconut, tomato, leafy vegetables, or sour items. Chili Powder: So far you have used red chilies or red chili powder in your cooking. Now substitute it with green chilies. Sour: Till now you have been using tamarind for sour taste. Now use raw tamarind, mangoes, lemon, or amla as much as you want. Sweet: Sugar is well known. Stop using it. You can use harmless honey in its place. You can also use dates. Ghee: You can replace this with the required amount of thick milk or curd. Oil: You can use the seeds that provide oil. For instance, in the place of groundnut oil, you can grind groundnut seeds and use the powder. Similarly, you can use coconut. They are not harmful.
Spices: Black cumin, ginger, coriander seeds, mustard seeds, etc., are prohibited. Replace them with pulses. Replace garlic with onion. Onion also gives a good flavor to the curry. So this is the secret to our success. In the place of seven harmful tastes, you can use many more helpful tastes and give your food new dressing. In such a way you can prepare anything and everything--chutney, soup, fry, snacks, sweets, and what not. Where there is a will, there is a way. You can still enjoy all types of tastes and be rid of your diseases. Of course, the first few days of this new routine may inconvenience you. You may feel disappointed. Let me suggest some methods to help you fight against this disappointment.
A few tips for happy eating:
1. Silent eating: You need the services of your tongue while eating. You also require the services of the same tongue while talking. The poor tongue can’t do two things at the same time! That’s why you should eat when you are supposed to eat and talk when you are supposed to talk. If you talk while you eat, the food gets stuck. But you don’t care. So it’s high time you realize you are sitting before the food for a purpose and so concentrate on that one task. You have two-fold advantage if you chew your food properly while eating. First, food begins being digested in the mouth itself. So a healthy practice is to chew solid food until it becomes liquid. At that time, if you try to talk, the tongue has to free itself to do so. It drives out the food into the esophagus before it is completely chewed. The mind, which has to decide whether the food is turned into liquid or not, and whether it is digested or not, is otherwise busy, so the tongue escapes its duty. Our elders did not tell us for no reason that we should chew our food 32 times. Food is digested 30% in the mouth, but a for talkative, only 10% gets digested. If you can eat the food in small morsels and chew it properly, then the digestion in the stomach will be quick and effective. The digestion in the mouth is equivalent to the primary education from kindergarten to fifth grade. Just as the primary education lays a strong foundation for higher education, the digestion in the mouth lays a strong foundation for the digestion in the stomach. Follow a simple logic. God hasn’t given us teeth in the stomach. This means each thing has it own place and has its own duty to perform. We should not neglect this duty. We are not born as animals to gulp food in a hurry and ruminate later.
We are different from them and so let us eat differently. Food that isn’t chewed enough in the mouth consequently cannot be digested properly. As a result, it stays long in the stomach and creates new problems. It becomes sour and produces gas, bloated ness, belching, breathlessness, etc. Another problem is, however much you eat half of it goes out in your stool undigested. That’s why though you eat a lot, you still feel weak. The second advantage is, if you eat silently, the saliva glands in the mouth, from contact with food, produce more saliva. As a result, the food in its first stage gets mixed up thoroughly with the saliva and digestive juices. Moreover, since you chew it more, it touches the upper part of the mouth more and so fills you with the pleasure of eating. So only those who chew their food well get the full pleasure from it. You won’t get hiccups if your food is mixed well with saliva when it enters the esophagus. If you do get hiccups, it means your body is sending you a warning signal that you are not chewing properly. Instead of realizing this, you drink water and continue to gulp food. That’s wrong. Man alone is given the ability to reason, but he does not use his reasoning ability properly.
Your food should get mixed up with saliva, not with water, mind you. After all, you talk the whole day. Can’t you keep quiet for the few minutes while you eat? Haven’t you learned, “Speech is silver, silence is gold”? Practice silence, especially while eating. It helps you in so many ways.
2. Concentrate on your tongue: The tongue conveys taste, but it is the mind that decides the taste. When the mind is distracted, it cannot sense the taste in food, so you taste nothing and you will not be satisfied. Today, man is surrounded by TV’s., CD players, magazines and newspapers, etc. But he is so busy working that he hardly finds time to watch them. So he tries to save time by watching them while eating. Then the tongue does its work like a lifeless machine. For some, the only chance they get to see their families is during mealtimes. So they all talk and laugh while eating. You wish to eat tasty food, but you don’t concentrate on the taste. Isn’t it funny? How can you pay attention to what the tongue tastes if your mind is elsewhere? One may argue that we eat without knowing the real taste of food? The food you eat with your mind on something else doesn’t give you more than 50% of the potential pleasure it could provide. You can accept this only if you test it with 100% concentration. Let me give you an example. I once served a sweet made out of honey to four people.
They were talking to me while eating the sweet dish. After they were halfway through, I asked them how it tasted. They unanimously answered it was good, it was sweet, and it didn’t look different though it was made out of honey. Now I asked them to chew the second half of it silently without talking. Then they were able to realize the salty taste more than the sweet. They could make out the presence of honey, and they thought it was much better than sugar. So, their first opinion was a biased opinion. They took for granted that it would be sweet, and so could experience no other taste. If you concentrate, you may even discern the taste of milk and coconut in it. The same is true with all fruits and vegetables. If you concentrate while eating, you can taste salt in them and find pleasure in it. If you eat dates and papayas this way, you will at once realize they are saltier than other vegetables or fruits. When you eat salt-free food, pay close attention and you will have the real flavor and pleasure of it.
The mind is the sole cause of everything. If you realize this and concentrate on what you eat, you can eat more with satisfaction. Then you will be benefited more through natural food and your health will improve.
3. Mix rice in vegetable curries or eat curries with chapattis (breads). Till now the practice has been to mix curry in rice. With that you eat less curry and more rice. Even that little curry is full of oil, salt, chili powder, etc. Since you are eating only a small quantity of curries, you are not getting enough protein that your body needs. With that you will not have free bowel movements and you will become prone to new diseases. But in our natural lifestyle, you should mix rice in curry instead of the other way around, so you will be eating more curry than rice. If you re involved in physical work, you can eat more rice, but it should be in equal proportion to the curry. The curries will not taste completely bland if you mix rice with them. Of course, in the beginning you may not like them with rice. If so, eat them with chapattis (breads). This way, you can consume more curry, and you will be healthy very soon. You will have free bowel movement. But if you eat only a small amount of this type of curry, you will be weak and face some problems. So don’t forget. Don’t eat too little curry.
4. Squeeze a lemon over food: The curries that you eat may not be tasty in the early stages. Some people don’t want to eat this kind of salt-free food. If you want to relish this food, even if you are not used to it, you better a squeeze lemon on the curries. It tastes sour and drives out the uneasiness caused by the salt-free food. The sour taste of lemon minimizes the saltfree flavor. There is another advantage too. Salt-free food doesn’t stimulate saliva quickly in the mouth, so you can’t taste it right away. On the other hand, the very idea of the lemon’s taste inspires saliva to spring out as a stream. As this sour taste hits the mouth, it gives a new dimension to curry’s taste. So you can eat more of the curry. Anyone can use one or two lemons every day. You won’t develop ulcers or gas if you use only this much lemon. So don’t entertain such strange fears. Lemon never does any harm. In fact, it provides vitamin C, which helps the intestines to absorb the iron from vegetables and rice. Lemon can also help lessen your cravings. Once you eat lemon you don’t long to eat anything for some time.
5. Add curd to tasteless food: You can eat some curries and really enjoy them. But some of them you may not. You get up from the table still hungry. This isn’t necessary. Instead, you can add some thick, creamy curd to curries you don’t like as much and see if it makes a difference. Curd has its own salt content and so helps substitute for the lack of salt.
6. Use more green chilies: Those who taste natural food for the first time complains of its spiciness. In fact, some people feel dry chilies or chili powder is bad for health and so avoid them. They are bad, there is no doubt, but green chilies are good for the body. Green chilies have nutritious value that is not found in anything else. Now you understand that you can eat as many green chilies as you can bear. As you eat this spicy food, the tongue enjoys its spicy taste and forgets the lack of salt. So it diverts the mind. Isn’t it enough? There is yet another advantage. This spicy taste also creates more saliva, which makes the food tasty. Of course, once the chili goes into your stomach, it causes no harm. Eat them along with curries and see for yourself. You will discover a new flavor.
7. Round pieces of onions all along: You can cut onions into round pieces, squeeze lemon over them, and have a bite of it every now and then while eating and see. Once you taste it, you yourself will wonder how you have missed such a tasty food all along. The raw onion can replace the salt in making food. Any amount of onion will not harm you. I want you to be far away from the clutches of diseases, medicines, doctors and hospitals. Health is happiness. No amount of wealth can give you the happiness of sound health. If you can stay free from salt for four months that is the foundation for your good health. In these four months, your age-old stores of salt will dissolve slowly in the water you drink and come out over the time in the form of sweat and urine. The new food--healthy and salt-free food--you eat for these four months will help get the salt out of your blood, so you will not crave for it again.
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