Today you will learn about how to reduce stress through meditation, inner listening, and adopting a whole food, plant-based diet. You’ll also learn how to prepare some delicious alternatives to dishes that usually contain eggs including eggless egg salad and besan omelettes.
Reduce your stress
Stress is one of the main causes of diabetes. Your diabetes may have started with a severe stressful incident in your life. It is important to make the connection and understand the importance of reducing or eliminating stress from your life.
Meditation and inner listening
You can handle all kinds of stress and enhance your physical healing if you are willing to sit with yourself for a few moments every day. Watch this video to see Nithya Shanti explain how to meditate and explore the practice of inner listening to reduce stress.
Key Points
- Decide whether you are describing or creating your reality. What you vocalise, visualise, and emotionalise, you actualise.
- Examine a situation that is causing you stress and evaluate what exactly is a threat. Allow yourself to fully feel whatever you are feeling.
- Cycle from images to words to feelings—the only three important things that happen in your inner experience—and simply notice what is causing the stress.
- Get unstuck by noticing or naturally observing your images, words, and feelings.
- Fully feel what you are feeling—it is very healing (Ego = Controlling vs. Wisdom = Observing).
Plant-based diet
Adopting a plant-based diet helps to reduce stress. When you are stressed, you produce adrenaline. When other animals are stressed, they too produce adrenaline. When you eat animals or animal products, your stress level increases. People on a plant-based diet are often more calm and self-confident and less angry, anxious, depressed, and fearful. You may begin to notice these changes within yourself. In addition, a plant-based diet can also help alleviate psychological problems.
Animals experience stress just like humans do. Despite evidence that animals can emotionally and physically experience the world in much the same way that humans do, we continue to treat them as mere commodities that can be exploited for our benefit. It is the desire to maximize profit and fill supermarket shelves that has led to such inhumane treatment of farm animals. Because it is less expensive than more humane alternatives, we accept the practice of keeping animals in abysmal concentration-camp style factory farms, zoos, testing facilities, pet stores, and cages of all sorts. In many of these facilities, animals lead bleak lives with no stimulation and are unable to perform their natural behaviours. Watch Glass Walls, a 10-minute film about the treatment of animals in India, to learn more.
Let’s take a look at the lives of some of the animals that we exploit for food.
- Cows and buffaloes: All mammals produce milk for the same reason: to feed their offspring. Female cows and buffaloes are artificially impregnated and separated from their calves for their milk. They cry for days for their babies. The male calves are starved to death or sold for slaughter for calf leather and veal. The female calves face the same fate as their mothers.
- Egg-laying chickens: Egg-laying female chickens are kept five to a cage in wire cages a mere 20 inches wide, with no place to stretch their wings, move, or even walk. Because their male chicks are of no use to the industry, they are discarded, usually by being crushed alive and fed to their sisters.
- Broiler chickens: Chickens raised for meat are bred to grow quickly and develop a high body mass. They typically grow from chick to slaughter size in just six weeks, twice as fast as naturally-bred chickens would. Once they reach maturity at the age of six weeks, it is not uncommon for them to die suddenly of a heart attack while running because of the excess weight.
- Pigs: Pigs are more intelligent than a four-year-old child. Pigs are usually slaughtered when they are only six months old and weigh about 250 lbs! Again, these animals have trouble supporting their weight. They can hardly walk and often suffer extremely painful arthritis and deformities in their limbs.
- Goats and sheep: Intelligent, inquisitive goats, who are known to be patient, nurturing mothers, and gentle sheep are also impregnated over and over again. Mother goats have their babies routinely taken for slaughter at the young age of six weeks. Goats are also often slowly bled to death while still conscious.
- Fish and shellfish: Billions of fish are caught each year. All too often, unwanted species are also caught and left to die without reason. Fish are sentient creatures and feel pain. They die by suffocation, which is extremely painful. Commercial fishing has decimated the aquatic environment. Shrimp nets kill countless sea turtles. Dragging trawlers kill all life including the plant life that fish thrive on at the bottom of the ocean. Overfishing is causing that are fished to become extinct, as well as those that depend on these fish for food.Isn’t it wonderful that we can eat delicious food and get healthy and reduce stress and avoid the suffering of other living beings?
Today you’ll learn how to prepare some delicious alternatives to dishes that usually contain eggs including eggless egg salad and besan omelettes. You can also find recipes for different egg replacers.
Mayonnaise alternative
Learn how to prepare cashew mayonnaise—a delicious, raw, egg- and oil-free alternative to traditional mayonnaise.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Cashew Mayonnaise:
- ½ cup raw, soaked cashews
- 2 tablespoons chopped onion
- Juice of ½ lime
- Mustard to taste
- 1 small garlic clove
- Salt to taste
- Pepper to taste
- ¼ cup water
Egg salad alternative
Learn how to prepare eggless egg salad—a delicious egg- and oil-free alternative to egg salad.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Eggless Egg Salad:
- 1 cup firm, crumbled tofu
- ¼ medium chopped onion
- 2 tablespoons finely-chopped red or green capsicum
- 2 tablespoons finely-chopped celery
- 5–6 tablespoons vegan mayonnaise (see the Error! Reference source not found. recipe on page Error! Bookmark not defined. of this booklet)
- Lemon juice to taste
- Salt and pepper to taste
- Parsley (optional)
Omelette alternative
Learn how to prepare a vegan omelette—a delicious egg-free alternative to egg-based omelettes.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Vegan Omelette:
- 1 cup besan
- 3/4 cup water
- 1/2 cup finely chopped tomatoes
- 2/3 cup finely chopped onions
- 3/4 cup finely chopped coriander
- 1/2-3/4 tsp black salt
- 1/4 tsp red chilli powder
- 1/2 tsp finely chopped green chillies
Nidhi Nahata had a lot of family stress before coming for the June 2016 21 Day Health Retreat. She has 2 teenage sons and works as a counselor. She found it surprising that this food filled her with an immense calmness, and the feeling that she is able to face everything.
“Changing my diet has been a beautiful integration of mind, body and soul.”
Earthlings -narrated by Joaquin Phoenix
Details the human use of animals in five specific areas: for food, clothing, entertainment, science, and as pets. Earthlings does not shy away from grotesque imagery to detail how human dependency on animals can lead to abusive practices. The film, directed and produced by vegans, attempts to raise awareness of inhumane animal treatment by comparing such practices to human exploitation, such as sexism and racism.
