Today you will learn how to eat mindfully and adopt healthy daily habits. You’ll also learn how to prepare upma and kheer with millet—a delicious, whole-grain alternative to wheat and white rice.
Eat mindfully
Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese monk, teaches a wonderful practice called mindful eating. This teaching is inspired and adapted from his philosophy.
Watch this video by Nandini Gulati to learn how to eat mindfully by paying attention to your food—contemplate and savor it with all of your senses.
Key Points
- Apart from what you eat, how you eat is also very important.
- Notice whether you eat mindlessly such as while checking your phone or watching television.
- Engage all your five senses when you eat—pay attention to the sight, sound, smell, taste, and feel of the food to derive maximum pleasure from it.
- Take a moment to wonder about and appreciate your food. Express gratitude to everything and everyone that made it possible for you to enjoy the food.
Adopt healthy daily habits
In addition to what and how you eat, there are many other factors that affect your health on a daily basis such as drinking adequate water, maintaining healthy relationships, respecting yourself and others, being grateful and benevolent, and avoiding harmful and addictive substances.
Watch this video by Nandini Gulati to learn about other daily habits that can be beneficial to your health.
Key Points
- As much as possible, do the following every day:
- Expose your bare skin to direct sunlight for at least 15–20 minutes.
- Get fresh air by leaving your doors and windows open for a few hours or spending time outside.
- Exercise vigorously.
- Rest, sleep, and relax adequately—listen to your body.
- Take some time to observe and connect with nature.
- Spend a few moments in quiet self-reflection.
Millet is a nutritious alternative to wheat and white rice. In addition, millet is a high-fibre grain indigenous to India. There are many different types of millet such as jowar, bajra, and nachni/ragi—explore the different types of millet that are available in your city. Today you’ll learn how to prepare some delicious millet dishes including upma and kheer.
Millet Upma and Salad
Watch this video by Nandini Gulati to learn how to prepare millet upma—a delicious, whole-food alternative to upma made with semonlina, and a millet salad.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Millet Upma:
- 1 cup foxtail millet
- 2 cups water.
For the Upma
- ½ cup finely-chopped onions
- 1 teaspoon freshly-grated ginger
- dried spices (optional)
- ¾ cup finely-chopped green beans
- ¾ cup unpeeled, finely-chopped carrots
- ¾ cup chopped tomatoes
- 1/2 cup chopped green capsicum
- chopped green chillies to taste
- Salt to taste
- A pinch turmeric (optional)
- Coriander for garnishing
For the Salad
- ½ cup chopped red peppers
- ½ cup chopped red peppers
- 2 tablespoons chopped olives
- 2 tablespoons chopped jalapeno peppers
- parsley for garnishing
Kheer alternative
Watch this video by Nandini Gulati to learn how to prepare millet kheer—a delicious, sugar-free, dairy-free, whole-food alternative to kheer made with white rice, sugar, and milk.
KEY INGREDIENTS
Millet Kheer:
- 1½ - 2 cups whole puffed amaranth (you can also replace with millets like kodo (varagu) or barnyard milled
- 1 cup water
- ½ - 2 cups coconut milk or almond milk as per desired consistency
- ¾ – 1 spoonful date paste or soaked, blended, sweet, white raisins
- Flavourings such as ¼ teaspoon cardamom powder or cinnamon powder and a pinch of saffron
- Raisins / chopped figs / apricots or chopped nuts such as pistachios and almonds to taste for garnish
Suvarna Avvari used to eat in a hurry. She would finish lunch in 5 minutes in front of the computer. Dinner was in front of the TV. After learning to eat mindfully she realized that she started relishing her food, she needed to eat less and was feeling full.
“I realized that what I had been doing all this while was absolutely mindless. My biggest takeaway was mindful eating.”
Trailer: Hungry for Change
It exposes shocking secrets, which the diet, weight loss and food industries don’t want you to know. A great summary of holistic healing learnt so far.
Buy full movie here
