What lessons can we draw from Qigong when it comes to food and nutrition? How can we use the consciousness to connect to our inner nutritionist and make the ultimate choices when it comes to our daily diet? With decades of experience both as a nutritionist and Zhineng Qigong teacher, Sahaja Yuantong explores these essentials towards health and well-being. My name is Torsten Lueddecke, and this is the Wisdom Qigong Podcast.
Welcome, Sahaja. Thank you very much for joining me. Today we had a great podcast about Qigong and aging. For those of the listeners that are interested, please go back and find that podcast. Today we’re going to talk about nutrition. Now, the disclaimer I have to make first is that Zhineng Qigong, as such, doesn’t really talk much about nutrition, so it’s not part of what Dr. Pang taught. But
we all know, obviously, that nutrition is very important for our health and well-being. When we spoke the last time, I think I mentioned that I have quite a few people in my network that are avid practitioners of Zhineng Qigong. But then, when I see what they eat all day, I say, “There’s no possibility you can get healthy with that kind of nutrition.” So I was reminded of this
old saying: “If you bake a bread, what is more important, the dough or the oven?” There is actually no answer to that because you can’t bake bread without the oven, and you can’t bake bread without having dough. So it’s not an either/or. It’s not one is more important than the other. In my personal opinion, nutrition is important in any case. And you can’t be successful with your health
and well-being if you don’t look into nutrition. So this is why we have you as a guest here today. Sahaja, welcome again. Let’s just get started and let me know how you got into the whole thing and what your thoughts are, please. All right, before I tell you how I got in, I want to answer that question from my perspective. Which is more important, the oven or the
dough? I would say the baker. I would, I would say the bread maker and what he is thinking while he’s making the bread. Good point. You’re bringing, you’re bringing a third element into the picture. It aligns so much with where I’ve come to with food. So I’ll just tell you briefly my history with food. I began teaching whole foods cooking, I guess it was something like 1994. I
taught for about 21 years. Macrobiotic, whole foods. I say macrobiotic slash whole foods cooking because macrobiotics is not very well known by many people. What attracted me to it was the whole philosophy behind yin and yang. And although it’s not strictly based on the TCM version of yin and yang, it just made so much sense to me that one should eat warming foods in cold weather and cooling
foods in hot weather. You don’t necessarily want to sit down and have ice cream while it’s snowing, and you don’t want to have a hot stew in the middle of summer. It’s that sort of intelligence that really now I come to see as the Dao. That was my beginning of the journey, and the reason that I sort of delved into learning macrobiotics was because I had, and I
probably mentioned this in the previous podcast, I had contracted dengue fever in India and was very, very sick. And I didn’t bounce back quickly. It’s a pretty serious condition to go through. But many people do bounce back after two weeks, a month. A bit like Covid, really, and I didn’t. So I decided my path was going to be nutrition. There’s also history of food. Some people grew up
with a very healthy relationship with food. But my story was interesting because my mother was very restrictive with some foods, and very much pushing healthy foods. I just saw what happened. When I got to the age of going to university, and I was never allowed to have this and this and this. I got there and it was just like, “Wow, the sky’s the limit.” I’ve learned many things
on the journey, that repression doesn’t help bring a balanced attitude to food. I see a lot of mothers with kids these days, no sugar, no this. Then they go to a birthday party and they go nuts for the sugar. So that’s not the way. There’s so many contradictory and confusing elements with food, especially now. In those years of teaching, I had continuous classes for 21 years. I taught
a lot of people how to cook miso soup, and brown rice, and sourdough bread, and vegetables and beans. The thing that people most suffered with or were confused with is who to listen to. Even now, there’s even more conflicting information around food. Many of my own beliefs have just flown out the window because I’ve seen people. Recently, a friend lost 17 kilos on the carnivore diet. To me,
in my mind, eating meat. Only meat, not even a vegetable. I couldn’t comprehend. It just, even aesthetically, felt wrong on so many levels. But he lost this excess weight that he couldn’t do as a vegan, as a vegetarian. That just made me look. There’s maybe many pathways through this nutritional world now. I get that there are many pathways to achieve certain things, but intuitively, I would also say
if you only eat meat, that can’t be good because that’s not who we are as people. If you look at our evolution and all of that. I’m not a nutritional expert, but I’m just talking about common sense here. Our body would need some vegetables, some greens because that’s what we always had. I totally get what you’re saying. There’s so much different information out there and so many different
diet styles. So how is one to navigate through that? And how does this relate to Qigong and to TCM, traditional Chinese medicine? Because that is kind of the perspective that we are taking here. I’ve been sitting with this. I’ve been contemplating this and just observing it in my own journey, which has gone from very narrow eating to wide eating in macrobiotics. So I’ve had periods of very narrow
eating and now I can eat much wider. Where for me, it is such an integration with Qigong is that the freedom or the wisdom came from connecting with the inner master. Teacher Liu, at the recent retreat, he talked about the inner doctor and other people talk about the true self, the inner master. I say that when you keep going in with practice, meditation, just your own spiritual journey,
eventually you wake up the inner nutritionist. I think this has happened for me in the last year and it’s amazing, because all the previous beliefs around food all really originated from reference framework. I would say almost all of them, what we align with. What you just said about, it’s not what we were or how we eat. There’s a book out now that your vegetables are trying to kill
you. That’s the name of the book. Now all these people coming up with this new information about lectins and all this, what I call partial information, like taking something out of context, it’s not integrated, it’s not unified, it’s not holistic. It’s like saying don’t eat almonds because they have a trace of arsenic in it and arsenic can be poisonous. So when I heard about this book, Your Vegetables
Are Trying to Kill You, I just, I have to laugh, and there are doctors advocating. So I thought there’s no choice anymore. You have to wake up this wisdom that knows your body and knows it on a day-to-day basis. What I’ve found is that if you try and fix it in Qigong, if you fix your illness, you fix your condition, like in your consciousness, it’s very hard to
change that. It’s that fixing. If you fix your nutritional belief system in the same way and your body changes, what can you do? You’re sort of bound to this belief system that’s fixed in concrete. Flexibility and awareness of how the reference framework influences food choices and food beliefs, I think, is super important. Does that make sense? Absolutely. I think it’s a very cool point that you’re making because
just like we have learned in Zhineng Qigong to work with the Qi, to get the information and to send information, it is the same when you talk about your inner nutritionist now, connect with that to understand what is good for you. For me, there is an important distinction here because there is the inner nutritionist that knows what’s good for you, and then there are these cravings. The cravings
are because industry has made us crave certain things, because they keep putting it into our nutrition, like sugar or like fried food and so on. That is a different thing than our inner knowing of what’s good for us. I would say I know these cravings. I know what they are, so I can put them into perspective. Where my inner nutritionist comes in is really when I have had
food. Because then if I listen to my body, I know whether it drains my energy or whether it gives me energy. I know how I feel after I had the food. This is where my consciousness comes in and where I get this information. Wow, I feel so much better having the salad compared to having had a burger. This is where the consciousness kicks in and has to observe
the cravings. On the other hand, that the next time I’m hungry, I’m making a good decision. The good decision is not based on any book or theory, but really based on my own experience of what happened to me, and my body and my energy after I had a certain food. So this is what I take out of what you’ve just said. This is what I find also in
my life. How I best operate through the whole world of nutrition. Is that in line with your ideas? I totally agree with you and just to enforce that. As I sort of gave myself more freedom, I would say in the last couple years, to go out and eat wider. I noticed a process, just what you said really started to take place. Even this year, it was sort of
funny at the retreat in China recently. They had little Snickers bars in the one single shop that was there, and everyone was, “Wow, there’s Snickers bars.” Because mostly it was Chinese junk food, I thought to myself, “I haven’t had a Snickers bar in honestly 50 some odd years.” That is absolutely forbidden. It’s junk but they’re very tiny. So I remember someone bought me one and I try. I
went, “Oh my God.” And then I thought, “I’ll never be able to stop because of the craving.” And I had a second one and then maybe a few days later I had another. I remember teacher Liu coming along and saying, “what did you buy?” I showed him the Snickers and he goes, “Once in a while, it’s okay.” But it just fell away by itself. Like now, I saw,
I went to the petrol station the other day, there was a whole wall of Snickers. So I had to take a picture for the group of Australians that went, but there was not one craving. And I thought these things have a way of working themselves out. I keep noticing with those sort of forbidden foods that, maybe yeah growing up in America, a burger was a big deal. Then
I find a place that has grass fed burgers in Fremantle. The first one, I think, “Oh my God, I’ve been missing out, I’m going to eat this every week.” Or my partner would say, “I guess you want that every day.” It just resolved very quickly because of what you said, “the mindfulness to observe.” Then I notice, as soon as something really doesn’t sit well, I go, “Well, that’s
finished, that’s finished.” But it’s not coming from a previous state where, oh, that book said, “This is good.” That book said, “This is bad.” Oh, this one will make me put on weight, this one will harm the liver, this one is not good for the heart. It wasn’t coming from any more book knowledge. It’s exactly what you said. It’s coming from direct experience of observation of what is
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If you’re interested, check the description, and let us know. For me, if I might add. It really helps to have insights when I have my food and say, “I’ve been having a couple of really good days, you know, with lots of salads and some green juices. It’s impossible to ignore how much better I feel now.” If I really get that and understand that, then this insight will guide
me. So it’s not a question of discipline. It is really me wanting to feel good. I have this insight now. That’s the nutrition that my body would like and myself would like. It is this insight that’s guiding me, not my discipline, of this is forbidden or that is forbidden. So that helps, because I don’t want to go through life with no “don’t do that.” I want to go
through life free and able to make the choices that I feel are good for me, and that I want for me. Because it has to be a positive experience, the whole nutrition thing. It is true. I mean, I don’t know how many times I’ve been sitting in front of a menu and I said, “In the Italian place, there’s the pizza and there’s the salad.” It’s tough initially to
decide for the salad sometimes. But I can tell you, after the third bite, I’m so glad I did it. And vice versa, if I have the pizza. After the third bite, I think, “Well, I don’t really need more of that. I wish I had chosen the salad.” So this is where the consciousness comes in. As human beings, we have consciousness. We can reconnect to this knowledge that we
have with these insights that we have so we don’t have to follow our first craving. We can actually go back to the consciousness and say, “Okay, wow. This is what I know and this is the experience I can connect with from the past. So let me make this choice and see how it goes.” But now I’m talking and you are the podcast guest. I’ll ask you a question.
Because one of the things that, when I’m listening, comes up. Which I think is a challenge for many people. Not everyone, and probably Qigong practitioners are already maybe a step beyond or ahead. I don’t want to make it sound higher, lower, but sometimes people don’t want to feel better. Why is that? Sometimes there is the saboteur that is choosing that food unconsciously because of some stress in life.
Maybe to dampen down the energy when people’s energy starts to come up. So there are all these sort of. It’s such a labyrinth of exploration for the psyche to go into the food and how it is playing out so many subconscious tendencies. So what I saw is people who could see how much better they would feel eating a certain thing. I also see it sometimes less and less
in myself, but there is some desire to shut down. You know what I mean? Now, this is a great point. Because I think for all of us that find ourselves making choices that are not good for us. This is an invitation to look into the question: How come I’m choosing that what’s going on for me, or in my life, or in my belief system that I keep making
those choices? This is obviously not just linked to nutrition. This is true for the whole of our life, but in particular for nutrition. I think it’s great because we don’t usually look at nutrition that way. When you said it, it was really opening my eyes. To say, “Okay, this is a valid point.” Because a lot of people just think, “Yeah, I don’t have the discipline, or I’m just
not good with eating.” But there’s always an underlying process that directs us to make these choices. To look at that process and to look into what’s going on in my thought process that I do make these choices, can be incredibly valuable. By uncovering that. I automatically make new choices because then I understand. So I think this is a great point you’re bringing up here. Do you want to
explore that a little? Do you have any own experience here? Well, something just came up that was so interesting. The founder of this macrobotic cooking, Michio Kushi. I can’t remember all of them. He talked about the seven levels of eating. The very basic level was what we’ve talked about, like craving. I want that. I want that taste sensation, or I want that high from sugar even. I suppose
you could even include alcohol in there as a substance. As they went up, there was one level I remember was intellect. Eating from intellect. Things you’ve read that make sense, that make sense to your intellect. Then emotional eating, eating for comfort, eating to soothe like a real childhood space or even a baby space. There were seven levels. I didn’t write them out, but the last level was eating
for spiritual practice. That was the one where it’s no longer guided by emotion, intellect, craving, sensation. It’s aligned with what you said, “I want to feel a certain lightness of being, for my spiritual practice, for my evolution.” How many people are there? I don’t know how many Qigong practitioners are there. I don’t know. It’s a very personal thing. Like you say, “Not everyone looks at food as an
arena to explore, investigate.” It has definitely been an area for me from the day one. It was like a mirror. A mirror of being able to see hidden things. I think by bringing up that point. I mean, consciousness is an integral part of Zhineng Qigong. There is no Zhineng Qigong without working on your consciousness, on your awareness. We shouldn’t isolate that to, “Oh, my God, my consciousness is
so high, and I’m so relaxed, and I’m connected with the wisdom of the world.” Then in everyday life, we go through life completely unconscious. Making stupid decisions, eating junk food or doing other crazy stuff. Consciousness really has to show up in all parts of our life. I think that can be a great encouragement to practitioners who find themselves in a situation where they work a lot with consciousness
when it comes to actually exercising Zhineng Qigong or getting into the right state. Then at the same time, they find themselves in other areas, like nutrition, where they’re not doing so well. It’s a great invitation to those among us to use the consciousness and expand that to all areas of our lives, and start with nutrition because that will have an incredible and immense impact. It’s also true for
relationships. I also know some practitioners that are the most amazing practitioners, but some of their relationships suck because they’re not taking this wisdom and this insight and bringing it to that area of their life. I think this is a wonderful invitation that you’re giving us, and what you just said. Just yesterday, I watched one of the short YouTubes that Teacher Gao did the subtitles or the translation of
Dr. Pang, and it was exactly about that. Maybe later I can send you the link to include because it was so much about, if you think Qigong is just this one-hour practice, two-hour practice, doing the right moves. If you think that’s what Qigong is about, That’s nursery school, kindergarten. It really has to become a life practice, and that includes everything. Dr. Pang was saying it has to be
reflected. Your relationships need to reflect it, your eating. I think even your home, how you do everything, is a reflection of your consciousness. You can read a person in so many ways. Not to be judgmental. The person that I trained under, learning macrobotics and macrobotic counseling, which was one-on-one counseling, he used to say every moment someone’s energy field (he was into Qigong) would broadcast everything about them to
someone who had eyes, could see, or could feel energy. We are continuously broadcasting our state of consciousness through our words, through our actions. Food is certainly a big one. That being said, I’m still stymied sometimes by someone who is thriving on a meat only diet. This one really has baffled me because this is a new trend. This is a new trend that many people are trying. I don’t
know if it’s big in your part of the world, but some of the Qigong students, one girl in particular. I was so surprised when she whispered to me because she was almost ashamed about it. She said, “I have such high inflammation in the body and it’s bringing it down.” Maybe short term these things can have an impact on the chemistry of the body. But long term it certainly
doesn’t make sense to me. I’m not sure what to say to that. But I tend to agree with you, that maybe some of these diets do have actually a positive short term impact. Because they do shift something, in the body, in the system. For example, please don’t follow this, but I know somebody who had cancer, and he was living on orange juice alone, and the cancer disappeared. But
after the cancer disappeared, he broadened his diet again because the body needs other nutrition. It might be very effective in the short term, just like if you take a medication or something. It might help you in the short term to solve something, but then you have to go back into a balanced nutrition and stop this medication, because it does harm in the long term. For some of these
diets, I don’t know what the goals are of people. I’m a fan of having things flow naturally. If I want to lose weight, I would never go and say, “Okay, I’m going to do a particular diet to lose so many kilograms.” Now I look at the mirror and say, “Well, oops, seems there’s a kilo too much.” Then I just eat a little less sugary, fatty, watch my carb
intake a little more. Over time, two months later, when I look again, this kilogram should have disappeared. But I’m not using any force. In a way, doing a restrictive balance is applying force to your own body. Not saying people shouldn’t do it. I’m not saying it can’t be good in certain cases, but it is an intervention that is kind of against the natural flow of things. Again, this
is just really my very personal opinion. Please, everybody do whatever they like. No, I feel exactly the same. It’s like there is this Daoist flow of yin and yang, and as soon as there is anything restrictive, you’re gathering momentum. They always say that the extreme of yin will reach and then it will come back to yang. That’s just how it works. As soon as you limit and say
I will never have this again, you can be sure somewhere down the track that this is going to come back, it’s going to make up for it. So the flow is so much more at ease. It really is like Dao. There should be another chapter in the Dao De Ching about the flow of food because it just goes that way. You asked if I had a personal example.
I followed the celery juice medical medium guy for so many years, maybe four or five years. Celery juice every morning, and it was very good. I felt it. Everything he said it would do. Then with the heavy metal detox smoothie and almost no oil. My acupuncturist, whose also name is Liu. Dr. Liu, in Australia, said to me, “Sahaja, you’re always purging, purging, cleansing.” He says, “You need more
nutrition.” And I said, “What does that mean?” He goes, “Chicken, fish, eggs, just more protein.” I was like, “Ooh, I want to keep.” That’s a sort of neurosis as well. Where does that come from? I had to look at that. Where is that? It’s almost like wanting to be clean all the time. What sense? Does food create a certain toxicity? I don’t know if other people probably can
relate to that. Then when I discovered my bone density was quite low and I listened to a few podcasts on protein. Just intuitively I thought Dr. Liu was right. I need to eat a bit more, get a bit more. Especially after a certain age, things change. I had cut out dairy for 45 years and all of a sudden have a bit of yogurt. It was just like wow.
Then I have to deal with all my beliefs. “This is bad.” I had to sort of run it through each time I would eat it. The information layer that we touched on, is so important. The friend of mine doing the carnivore, I saw he went and ate a Portuguese custard tart or something. “Oh, this is carb, this is lard. This is so bad.” And I said, “You are
a Qigong person. If you know what information does and you’re choosing to eat it, but giving it this information that it’s poison, how is that going to help you?” And he said, “Yeah, you’re right.” If you’re going to eat something, at least in that moment. Just say, “I choose to just enjoy the properties of this food, what it’s offering me.” But to continue to eat something, while a
narrative is running about how bad it is for you. I can’t think of anything more anti, nutrient positive. That’s probably the most important point, I feel. Absolutely. I also want to touch on the point, we kind of said that in certain diets or in certain phases of our life, we tend to say, “This food is evil or this is. Oh my God, I shouldn’t touch this. It’s so
bad.” This is a belief thing, an idea that we are holding. There might also be stuff like, for me, for example, I wouldn’t touch a sugary drink. Not because I think it is evil, which it probably is, but just because I just don’t like it. Then it’s clear there’s never going to be. It’s not that I’m going to have a Fanta one day and say, “Oh my God,
this is so lovely. I missed all those years.” It’s not going to happen because I just don’t enjoy it. So that’s also a distinction to make between labeling food as evil or at one point just saying, “This is not what I enjoy.” Not everything we avoid is just because of our mindset. It might be just that we don’t like it. I agree. I think I saw someone having
Coca Cola in China and I was like, “People still drink that?” The same, there’s no attraction. I don’t have any attraction to coffee. I know coffee is such a big thing. It used to be a big thing. I tasted it not long ago and I went, “Wow, it’s left me.” But it was a natural leaving. It wasn’t a mind leaving. I think that’s what you’re saying. It naturally
is not part of your desire system or nothing about it. You have no idea what you’re talking about, Sahaja. Coffee is so nice. I was addicted to coffee. I was so addicted to coffee. Now it’s chai. But also with coffee, I learned through my TCM doctor—hello Dr. Lulu, if you’re listening—to restrict the coffee because the second, third, fourth, or fifth cup didn’t do me any good. I noticed
that, but still, I was in this routine of doing it. Now I have like my one cup in the morning, and I really enjoy that. It’s great in the morning, and then I’ll switch to green tea or other beautiful drinks, and I feel so much better. I’m not missing out on the coffee. Just by realizing that the fourth cup doesn’t really add any value, the first cup becomes
so much more precious, and it becomes a moment of joy. This is how I navigated the coffee thing. Now we are very much in practical details here. I’d like to also take this opportunity because you started off the podcast with a practical thing, where you explained yin and yang, and we probably don’t want to have a hot stew in summer and ice cream in winter. Are there any
practical advice that you can give that are coming from TCM Qigong? Just some broad directions as a takeaway for our listeners here today? For me, that understanding of—there used to be like a chart. The extreme yang foods would be considered salt and meat. Remember, this is not necessarily the TCM yin and yang, but this is the macrobotic. It’s close enough. The foods that caused internal heat, the foods
that cause contraction. Yang is like contraction. Yin extreme would be sugar and, in a way, tropical fruits that are juicy, because of liquid. If you think of yin energy as wet, slow, expansive, moist, like a damp internal climate, then your yang is your hard. Yin is soft, dry heat, summer, winter. I think you can start to feel the energy. Sometimes, if someone is intrinsically yang by nature, they
would tend to have a red face, maybe higher blood pressure, maybe not speedy, zippy, maybe prone more to anger. A rising emotion, as opposed to a yin emotion, which is more imploding back, like depression or sadness. Someone who has that very yang tendency to eat a lot of meat and salt, you might find they already do that, and that’s one reason why they gravitated that way. But to
offset that tendency, to lean more toward an important one—yin raw, yang cooked. If you think of yang energy as heat, fire, and also the time of cooking, something that’s cooked very quickly, like a quick stir-fry, will never be as yang as something like a slow-cooked stew for hours. Does that make sense? The amount of heat and time, not the spot, not the herb, but the actual time. Someone
who has that yang tendency will do well to have more juices, more fruit, more salads, more things that are leaning toward the cooling side. On the other side, someone who’s cold all the time—it’s not the time to be having smoothies with frozen berries. Someone who’s cold, a little bit slow, maybe sad or weepy, that sort of energy might do better with a bit more salt in their diet.
There’s no hard, fast rule that salt is bad or that fruit is good for someone who’s extremely yin. I was extremely yin when I had dengue fever, chronic fatigue. I didn’t have fruit for years, not one piece of fruit, because the sugar, the moisture, the coldness of it—I could feel it increased the fatigue. Does that make sense? It does, yes. Choosing. Identifying. There’s a constitutional type that, back
in the day, we used to read the face. You could see the shape of the face could say a lot. Someone with a more square face or more compact, muscular body would always be a more yang constitution. So you could have a yang constitution but have grown up eating a lot of sugar, sugary drinks, and have a condition that is more yin with a yang constitution. It’s an
interesting combination of factors to look at in balancing the diet. Again, coming back to that inner nutritionist waking up, just waking up the inner wisdom healer, doctor. You will intuitively know that. You will intuitively know that you’re feeling cold, therefore you don’t want cold juice for breakfast. Maybe you want warm oats. I think rather than learning all the information, which I did, I taught a lot of people
this and they found it amazing. How many are still connected to that, I have no idea. If you keep going with practice and meditation, you’ll just come to that space, like you have, where you eat something and you observe what happens afterward. I think that’s the key: observation and no judgment. Just notice. Take note. I mean, the no judgment point is big. I think we’ve mentioned this a
couple of times in other podcasts as well. It’s really about observing, because by observing, it gives you a possibility to understand. The moment you go into judgment, you already have a filter that you look at things through, and that doesn’t bring you closer to the reality or to what is. I’ve got a practical question though on the salt thing, because I realized that when you mentioned salt, I
think, “Oops! Salt.” Can that be replaced by other spices, just by using other spices? Would that have the same effect, or are you really just talking about salty food? Salt has that yang energy of contraction, of bringing things together. A lot of herbs are more yin by nature, more relaxed by nature. There’s no way that other herbs sit on the… The only thing that might fit there would
be soy sauce, tamari, miso. Those are also extreme. I’ve come to learn that a little bit of good sea salt is really good in the diet. That brings us to another key point in the dao, moderation. You know balance. We touched on cravings. Often, people will say with cravings, if you can allow yourself just to have a very small amount to satisfy the craving. If you have that
sort of discipline, allow yourself to have the craving but just limit it to something. Sometimes it’s been recommended to have a touch of your childhood food. So, if you grew up in a place like Switzerland or the Danish countries, where cheese is so important, but you’re not a dairy person, but you miss that, maybe you have the finest cheese. You get the finest chocolate. You get the best
quality. So if I’m going to have something that’s sort of out of my norm diet these days, I will get the absolute best. Because I know I might only have it that one time, for quite a long time. As you said, the quantity matters. In this case, because two spoons of sugar are twice as much of an issue as one spoon of sugar. I personally, just sharing from
my life. What… my habit has become. I have a tiny little box where I put a biscuit inside because I know that sometimes in the afternoon, when I go for a tea or something like that, I would love to have this. Just a little biscuit with my tea. It’s just a lifestyle thing for me. I enjoy that. But when you go into a coffee shop and order your
tea, the smallest thing they have is a huge chocolate chip muffin. So for me not to be going that route, I just have this biscuit with me. I’ll unpack it, and it’s perfect. That’s all I need because it’s really just this taste. I can’t remember when last I had more than one scoop of ice cream, because after I’ve licked three times, it’s already enough for me. I don’t
need more than that. I had the taste. It’s beautiful, it’s great., but my body says it’s enough. Sometimes for me it’s great because my wife likes to have the odd ice cream in between, so I don’t have to buy my own. I’ll just lick, and that’s it, done over with. Right? That’s beautiful. Everything you’re saying, I just so love. There is another saying we used to have that,
“Quantity affects quality.” So even the best food, the most nutritious food. If you eat a huge quantity of it, it’s like that thing, “Medicine can become poison, poison can become medicine.” So that little bit of something that is forbidden can maybe emotionally satisfy something. You take the healthiest thing and you eat a mountain of it and it doesn’t matter that it’s high on the nutritional scale. So it
really is about moderation. I have a little plaque in my kitchen. More is not always better. I found that somewhere and I thought, “Yeah, it’s like quantity affects quality. ” And in the retreat in China, Teacher Liu is always going on about 70%, each is 70%. We’d be eating and another 10 dishes would come out. I’m at 90%, I’m at 110%. The way we deal with things like
ice cream, we get the kitty scoop if we’re going somewhere. My partner and I, we’ve learned we don’t want to eat that much anymore. We don’t feel good, we get sleepy. We can share something, we get tagged away. We bring half a bag, because it’s true, the portions in restaurants have gotten bigger and bigger, and people are eating bigger quantities, and they are getting bigger. I don’t know
how it is in your part of the world, but Australia is catching up to America with a very high obesity rate. Yes, absolutely. It’s the media, it’s the processed food. That’s the last thing maybe I will say. If you can eat natural whole foods with the least amount of human intervention and tampering. I mean, just to eat vegetables, just to eat fruit. If you’re going to eat meat,
grass-fed, humanely raised—just common sense. As soon as things are all packaged up, you look at the label but you don’t want to start reading the labels. Well, you do want to read the labels. It’s so easy to eat real food. It really is. I think that is probably the one thing there where there’s no controversy or no other or second opinion to that, that process. I haven’t read
any book that says natural food is a problem. It’s really the processed food. If you can make the choice between having food in their natural state compared to highly industrialized, I think this is a no-brainer. This is something quite easy to follow. Just when you go shopping, make sure you put the right things into your trolley, and you’ve already made a big step towards your own health and
well-being. Local farmers. We like to go to the farmers’ market rather than the big grocery stores. It’s also so much more fun, the farmers’ market. Yes. And to meet people, so it will also satisfy your social needs, and you have a good chat with the farmer. That’s right. All right, well thank you very much, Sahaja. We are coming to the end of our time here. That was again,
very, very interesting to talk to you. I hope there were one or two takeaways for our listeners. That makes them think, or make new choices, or become more aware, or use their consciousness when it comes to nutrition. So thank you very much, Sahaja. It was lovely to talk to you again and I’m looking forward to a third episode sometime soon in the future. All right, thanks Torsten. Bye
bye, everyone. We trust you enjoyed this conversation, and we invite you to subscribe to our podcast so we can stay in touch and notify you of future episodes. We will end today’s episode with the Eight Verses Meditation performed by Zhineng Qigong teacher Katrien Hendrickx. Enjoy. To get your free eBook on the Eight Verses Meditation, please check the show notes below.
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