Mindful eating
This article is about mindful eating. Do not be cross when I talk about cows and eating grass. That is just to make the discussion interesting. If you would want to skip the details, you can go to the discussion. Or if you need to take another approach, I suggest you read about How to eat a mango Mindfully. Let's look at cows.
Why do cows eat grass?
I used to watch cows graze in the nearby field from top of a tree. Later I learnt that cows could digest grass, but not humans. Cows and for that matter animals who eat grass, or herbivorous have stomach filled with bacteria, which are capable of breaking down cellulose. Hence, the Cow stomach is so called "Sweet Home" to large number of bacteria. And cow absorb carbohydrate. That is easily understood. Yet, if you look at a cow, they not only eat grass. But they build a massive muscle mass. How do they get their protein from?
Cows, get their protein by digesting the bacteria. Essentially for the bacteria, the intestinal tract of the cow is the place of the home and place of the doom. When they go down with food into the lower parts of the digestive tract, bacteria themselves become the victim to chemicals and enzymes, being killed after getting used. They become the source of "Protein" for the cow.
So, let's leave the science behind and ask the question again. Why do cows eat grass? There are several answers. One simple explanation is that they get hungry, and they have taste for grass. Digestible or not, cows would not eat grass if they do not get hungry and they do not have a taste for the grass. So, if we look carefully both hunger and the taste are essential survival tools for the cow. Being animals, they do not overthink about these things, like we do. They just get hunger, and they eat what tastes them.
Why do we not eat grass? mindful eating.
That there is a simple wisdom, for our mindful eating. Although we do not think about this we do eat for the same reasons as cows. We eat because we feel hungry, and we do have taste for food.
Imagine we do not feel hunger, no ghrelin (hunger hormone) in your system. I am sure we will be so busy that we would die, without any food. Same goes to the taste. But this is something which have evolved for us to better understand what is good for us. Just when humans lived in jungles, they did not have a food hygiene. They relied on their smell and taste to identify what is good to eat. So essentially taste is also a survival tool. Only in modern supermarket era that taste have become a five-star luxury that costs hundreds of dollars.
Mindful eating - Binge eating and obesity.
Get to know about hunger and taste is essential to mindful eating. As an example, let's assume you have a habit of binge eating. If you look at your eating pattern, you will understand, that you start eating, because you are hungry. Get to know your hunger. Know exactly where it feels. And if you do not have the hunger, do not eat! And while eating you will know the feeling of hunger goes away. Not suddenly, but gradually. And anything you eat after your hunger is gone is going to add onto your extra weight. And that is better left alone in the plate or even thrown away than eaten. As anything beyond this is a reason to make you sick, diabetes hypertension or MI. As you can see, you cannot do or even think about controlling your eating habits without getting to know your hunger.
Same goes to the taste. However, taste is tricky. Taste is something we wrongly attribute to be in the Ice cream. However, it is never in the food. And we can think it is in the tongue. But it is not true either, as dead person's tongue would not feel anything. You can read more on this in eating a mango article. So, the taste we can assume is in the mind. But what is mind?
What is mind, is a discussion for another day. Maybe you can have look at the consciousness article or for that matter even a lump of clay to understand the mind. However, what is mind is a deep subject which can only be explained to someone who has been thinking about it for a long time. I would not do that mistake here. After all this is just to explain why we cannot eat grass, and simply it is because we do not feel taste for it. Not by our choice but by nature. As you can understand, we would be eating any dung, if we had taste for it. As pictured in the film Jacky in Women's Kingdom.
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