FEATURE ARTICLE
"Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food."
- Hippocrates (460-377 B.C.)
How To Live Like a Millionaire
In Your Own Home
By Hrishikesh Singh
Are You Doing the Single Most Important Thing That Will Improve Your Lifestyle?
The first step to a vibrant body is eating well. Eating healthy, fresh, well prepared food makes you energetic, strong, and happy. Health in itself is a form of wealth. The Ancients promoted a way to eat that is as useful today as it was millennia ago.
They knew about the connection between eating, cooking and health. They taught that every cell of the body has consciousness, and food is meant to nourish these cells. The energy you pour into these cells by how you cook and what you cook, is the energy these cells pass back to the body and the mind.
Cook to Improve the Health of Your Body
By cooking healthy food in a joyful way, you ensure your body is healthy and joyful. By eating naturally, you will discover not only how to sustain your body, but how to live a life of harmony and balance.
All the riches in the world can not be enjoyed without a healthy body. Health is wealth. The single most important thing you can do to improve your lifestyle is to eat less processed food and more freshly prepared food. It is fun to eat out, and even more fun to not do dishes, but even the fanciest restaurant in world is no match for a meal lovingly prepared at home from freshly bought vegetables. When you sit down to a home cooked meal you are living a truly rich life.
How Marketing Changed the American Kitchen
In her book Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950's America Lauro Shapiro talks about how the food industry in 1950’s America wanted to sell mass produced, processed, and canned foods to middle class housewives. Originally created for soldiers during World War II, food companies wanted to bring processed foods into every home in America. Initially, housewives resisted.
Food companies did studies on the source of the resistance and they found that women enjoyed cooking and nourishing their families with freshly cooked meals. The studies showed that American housewives did not find cooking to be a hardship.
Having learnt this, the food industry changed the focus of their marketing to convince women that cooking was a chore. It took over a decade for this idea to ingrain itself in American culture but by the 1960’s packaged and processed food was a mainstay in most American kitchens.
A Real World Example
A friend of mine was once complaining about how time consuming cooking was and that after coming home from a hard day's work the last thing she wanted to do was stand in a hot kitchen for an hour. When I told my friend why I enjoyed cooking, she said she would consider it.
A few months later I got a call from her. She told me that to her utter surprise cooking for herself actually relaxed her after a long workday. It proved to be an excellent way to wind down from work and feel the comfort of her home. Now she is cooking for herself all the time and loving it!
Cooking is a joy and a meditation, not a chore. The act of cooking nourishes your body and soul. You send yourself the message that the health of your body is important and that you care about yourself enough to put this time into taking care of yourself.
Food
An easy way to increase your natural food consumption is to make a habit of buying fresh vegetables and buying less processed food. Then, when you are in the kitchen and have NO energy to cook a meal and would rather just open a can or a box and plop the contents into the microwave, THAT is when you have to push through the idea that it seems hard and cook the fresh stuff in the fridge.
I know it isn't easy. I have those moments of no energy in the kitchen too. But I've seen the other side of cooking a fresh meal. I know that once I start I will enjoy the process and relish the result. So I just ignore my mind. I don't order a pizza or grab a microwave dinner. Instead, I pull out the zucchini and tomatoes and put on the rice and 40 minutes later, I sit down to feast with myself, my mind, my body and the Divine Consciousness in all three of us.
Bring the Wealth of Yogic Cooking Into Your Home
Begin by cooking just once a week and then building up to a frequency that works in your schedule. Soon you will feel like a millionaire when you look in your fridge and see the wealth of food at your fingertips.
Highly Recommended by Yoga Unlimited
The best resource we have found for the yogic approach to cooking and eating is the informative and detailed book Romancing the Stove, A Practical Guide to a Lifelong Celebration of Eating for Health by Samahria Ramsen. It contains nutritious and delicious meals not available in any other book. It teaches a way to cook that empowers the body and the mind. Place a copy in your kitchen cupboard and enjoy cooking and eating as an ecstatic experience. You can order it by clicking this link:
www.ecstasyofeating.com
