Here is an excerpt from my daily journal on my Private Blog, which I thought of expanding slightly and posting on my Public blog.

I had only one ripe mango and two bananas for the entire day today. Had a few raw cashews just now. I am surprised how I am able to survive without feeling hungry or weak with virtually no food for an entire day. It happens like this to me on several days.

If I don’t feel hungry, I am against eating unnecessarily. I fail many times and fall into the temptation. But also successful most times by not eating anything if I was not hungry. So it appears most energy we consume every day is actually coming from the stored energy, not from that day’s intake. Also it appears, that surviving with only couple of fruits and handful of dry fruits should be adequate for an entire day for the all-day-penance-saints. I have realized today that it shouldn’t be astonishing.

I think if I do mostly meditation  and nothing else, even I can survive with just about that much food or just a little more. Perhaps the metabolic rate drops down considerably, if we don’t eat food that is ‘not asked by body’. Will I get to try some day??? Wish I could!

I used to wonder when I was young if it was really true that the saints living in the Himalayas survived just on some dry fruits and fruits. Most of us (well in my case actually ‘used-to’, not anymore) have three-meal-a-day. And we tend to have come to a consensus that, that is the norm.

There was one diet activist (whom I call as Tamil Bhaskar as he spoke mostly in Tamil in his videos, and I never hard time remember his full name), who said whatever we followed or not, one strong suggestion he had was to ‘eat only when hungry’. And he said we could eat anything (including non-veg) and any quantity with no limit as long as we followed this rule.

I respected this particular advise from him aside from any others he may have given. I am not saying he is the only one who has said this. But it appears eating only when hungry is a very good thing, scientifically as I look at it. The digestive juices are at their brim at this time, eagerly waiting to ‘digest-away’ anything that is thrown at it, in a jiffy. And since the glucose levels would’ve been low anyway (some signs of making you feel hungry), the digested food and thus the converted glucose is spent away in coming periods without much fat storage. I like this concept. And I have since been trying to follow this, in last few months (perhaps six). And even so, since my retirement from active IBM career.

On many days, at the end of the day (or the next day morning) when I recollect what I had eaten, I am surprised how little I had eaten on some days. But how come I didn’t feel hungry?

Yet during the weekends when I would have normal cooked meals (rest of the days I only eat raw food that is not heated), I would have a completely normal meal and would have a fairly heavy meal. But by evening, I would feel that my stomach was still heavy and doesn’t need a dinner. I guess my raw food habits have taken me to the better of eating not only healthy stuff, but also of so much as the body was asking (with a few exceptions here and there of course).

So it appears, we all seem to be eating much more than the body needs or is asking for. Thanks to the agriculture revolutions modern mankind has created, many of us had fallen into the trap of assuming three-meal-a-day is the norm. Need to give time to body though over a period of time to allow it to settle down. It doesn’t happen just the next day. I have not lost weight in the last six months, nor have gotten any weaker. Perhaps it is possible to bring down the metabolic rate of body and make it efficient.

We could actually not just survive, but live AS HAPPILY and content as otherwise, with less.

Thoughts?