Feed Your Body's Smart Cells

Call us romantics. But do you know what we like to think? That every time a warrior in the Mahabharat shot an arrow from his bow, it was not to kill. Rather, it was a metaphorical act - to trigger off a quiverful of new ideas and let them cleave through the air thick with outdated notions. It was to allow clean, invigorating thoughts to shaft through the excess 'fat' and generate fresh, positive energy into the field of life. To restore, to rejuvenate, to bring back a balance, a rationality, to make new patterns of peace with a surging vibrancy into an almost-forgotten art called living.

So, when we write about how carbohydrates give you energy, proteins build your muscle tissue, about why fats are stored for life-survival situations, it is not to drive you into an eating laboratory where you measure out in test tubes the required quantities to be swallowed like medicine. It is to allow the arrows of health-filled facts to sink into your mind, to give you new perceptions, to show you how your body treats the food you eat and how it extracts the maximum nourishment for itself. To tune you into your inner receptors and awaken your mind and spirit, so that with this awareness you gather all these strands of information and insights and shape them to suit your individuality and taste.

So that you are entranced enough to bring little changes into your eating habits. Little changes that neither annoy nor disrupt your daily life. Little changes that make big differences. Little changes that ultimately reap immeasurable benefits over a lifetime.

You can do it by appealing to the smart cells in your body. For, these smart cells generate a continuous cycle of complex actions and reactions. They act as a think tank in your body and bless it with a natural ability to crave for food that maxi mises its efficiency and reject that which minimizes its capabilities. These smart cells are the genius that keep you alive.

These cells are not difficult to please. They do not expect you to peer at labels and calculate the mgs or mls that are good for you.

All they expect you to do is to eat a wide variety of natural, wholesome food. And to simultaneously synchronize it with the taste that is mapped on your tongue.

You can start your great exploration into, the wonderland of food by forgetting such terms as 'carbohydrates, proteins, etc. They are only alphabets of a language called Nutrition. You don't need to recite your alphabets daily to read a book. Besides, in this life-sustaining book of nutrition, there are only a few words that are easy to understand, to remember and inculcate into your daily vocabulary of living.

They are:

Fresh vegetables
Cereals
Pulses
Fresh fruits

They are the sinews of your fitness philosophy.

They activate and nurture your body's smart cells. They are found in great abundance in the supermarket of Nature and all you have to do is to select a wide range and store them in your larder and refrigerator. You don't need butter or ghee or sugar - they only retard your smart cells by smothering them. Thus limiting or arresting your growth potential. Instead, if you eat nourishing foods and exercise, you can reach heights ­physically, mentally spiritually - that you had never dreamt were possible earlier. Not only because you increase your efficiency, but because, this way, you maintain it. And as you develop a greater under- standing, you will find a shift in your thoughtscape. For, you will want to eat to live, to derive the best from life. You will realise that all along, you were living to eat and erecting barriers to your growth.

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