Habits, Food Habits

Reflecting on my habit of eating a salad every single day without fail, I thought "What is it that makes me eat this salad every day?", the first answer was, "Because my mom made it.", but after a little more thought, it dawned on me that I put things in perspective a long time before I actually ate that meal.

If you eat clean, your blood sugar remains stable, what this means is that there are no sudden drops or spikes in blood sugar. You know those sudden cravings you have to eat something, mostly junk? That's because of a drop in blood sugar. If you're diabetic, a drop in blood sugar is a very serious thing, you could faint on the street if you're low on blood sugar. Coming back to our main point, clean eating maintains our blood sugar, and you won't get those cravings. If you've eaten some McDonald's or KFC kind of junk, there are high chances that you feel these kind of cravings often, watch the documentary 'Supersize Me' for more info on this.

So, in the cycle, you eat clean, you don't feel the craving to eat junk, that leads you to eat clean and so on and so forth. Similarly, you eat junk, the candida yeast in your body crave sugar, you feel like eating junk again and again and so on and so forth. To break this cycle, you need some kind of external force, this usually comes in some sort of realization or someone that you meet, or something that you watch or read(like this blog post!!!!). When such an event occurs, you must take a decision, a decision to focus on health. If this is the first time you've done so, it will be difficult, but it's the first step. Take it with the faith that you can achieve whatever it is that you want.

This is the seed of a habit, a habit that forge a better life for you. "Habits are like railway tracks, they take time to make, but once made, they take you where you want" - Patricia Fripp. To make it simple, just start with one meal per day as a salad. Small bowl or big bowl, you decide, but start a salad, the advantage here is that you don't put on any weight whatsoever regardless of the quantity. Salads feel better on the stomach, they are light, they aid digestion, even if you eat junk for another meal, a salad will facilitate smooth digestion and assimilation. Try it, it's an amazing feeling.

This post was to make you start a habit, If you start any one habit that creates better health for you, then I'm satisfied. Small habits are things like, taking 2 deep breaths after each meal to send more oxygen into the body to speed up digestion and keep the brain fresh after a heavy meal. Another small habit could be having 500ml of water first thing every morning when you wake up because the body is most dehydrated at the time.

Possibilities are countless, but start small, and keep at it.

Regards,

Prithvi

Cucumbers: The Alkaline Food

Continuing with the theme of the month of alkaline recipes, the veggie* for this week is the cucumber. Alkaline inside and out, cucumbers make for awesome alkaline foods. They are light, fill your tummy and they are alkaline, what more could you ask for? Well, before you say 'taste', let me accept the fact that cucumbers don't taste all that great, but they don't taste all that bad either, they are simply neutral.

Let's dive into ways we can use cucumbers in our alkaline diets.
1) Cut Slices
2) Cut Slices in Salads
3) Cut Slices as a side dish

Yes, you read it right. The famous cucumber is best used as cut slices. Let's go into some details about how we can use them to the best possible way.

1) Cut Slices: The most common and easy way to eat a cucumber is to peel it, slice it and serve on a neat plate. It will be ready in 2 mins, best for a snack, in the initial days, cucumbers were my breakfast and lunch. Over time, newer dishes have come up in my menu. If the plain cucumber is too bland for your taste, add some chat masala (spicy & tangy powder), although chat masala has non alkaline ingredients, since we are adding them in minuscule quantities, it's alright.

2) Cut Slices in Salads: As you may remember from some of the pictures of my salads, cucumbers are a daily feature in my salads, sliced up a little differently than usual, cucumbers make a great filling, they are cheap to buy and one cucumber is often enough to fill up nearly half of the salad.  The important thing to remember if you're one of the people that can't eat cucumbers directly, make sure you add some fruit that can add some sweetness to the salad to neutralize taste factor of the cucumber. This is a big one for me.

3) Cut Slices as a Side Dish: Cucumbers are present in every restaurant, and many times they are just placed as starters before the meal and the best part is that many times they don't even charge for them. A note to over eaters, cucumbers are the way to go if you want to eat less of junk. You have only 1 stomach, you can either fill it up with salads, with soup, with starters, with biryani*, or with ice cream. But the end result is that your stomach will be full after a while, and if it's full with cucumbers, you've put on no weight whatsoever, if you're full with biryani, you've put on 1500 calories.

Note: The satiety reflex, the reflex of the stomach that tells you you're full is triggered faster when you eat healthy, That means that if you're eating healthy foods, you will eat less and still have all the energy you need.

True, the list above is small, but  it's not list that makes the difference, it is the application of the list in your daily life. I eat cucumbers in the way I mentioned above, it makes a huge difference to the quality of my life. I feel phenomenal, very necessary element to balance out acidic foods.

Keep this in mind while using cucumbers from now on.

Please post your experiences with cucumbers, and let me know about anything you'd like to hear more about.

Regards,

Prithvi

* in India, we refer to cucumbers and tomatoes as vegetables.
* Biryani is steamed flavoured rice that often includes Non Veg.