How You Eat Matters More Than What You Eat

We live in a world obsessed with what to eat — keto, vegan, gluten-free, sugar-free, superfoods, miracle foods. But we most conveniently forget how to eat. Your body doesn’t just digest the food on your plate, it digests the energy in which you eat it.

I’ve seen it everywhere — families eating with saas-bahu dramas playing in the background, kids glued to cartoons, teenagers binging thrillers, and dads and uncles on their lunch break shovelling food in while news anchors scream about the latest political scandal or celebrity gossip. Every bite is being swallowed with noise, arguments, and adrenaline. And then we wonder why we feel heavy, bloated, irritable, or tired even after eating healthy. 

Here’s the science behind it — your parasympathetic nervous system is your “rest, digest, and heal” mode. Unless it’s activated, your stomach isn’t fully breaking down food, your gut isn’t absorbing nutrients efficiently, and your metabolism is half asleep. When you eat in a state of distraction or stress, your body thinks it has to digest danger, not dal. Blood is sent to your muscles instead of your gut, so it can prepare for fight or flight. Digestion takes a back seat.

Eating should be a sacred ritual. Your digestive fire — your Agni — is a Havan inside your body. Every meal is an offering, an ahuti, into this fire. If you come to it with gratitude, reverence, calmness, and focus, the fire burns bright, turning your food into prana and vitality. But if you’re distracted, irritated, or ungrateful, it’s like pouring wet wood into the Havan — smoke, sputter, and incomplete combustion.. i.e poor burning.

Ideally, sit on the ground in sukhasan, with your plate also on the ground. When you bend slightly forward to take each bite, you’re activating your vagus nerve — the main gut-brain axis — which deepens your body’s connection to digestion. Eating with your five fingers is not just tradition — each finger represents one of the five elements that make up your body, and your food. Touching your food signals your brain about what’s coming, so it can prepare your digestive system accordingly. And when you sit cross-legged, blood circulation is naturally directed to your digestive area, making your system far more efficient.

Before you take your first bite, pause. Offer gratitude — to the farmer, the vendors, the cook, the bread-earners of the family, the soldiers who protect the land, your parents, your ancestors, your gurus, your ishtadev, your kuldev — every force that brought this food to your plate. Play a soft instrumental, chant a mantra, or simply eat in silence.

When you eat like this, every part of you — body, mind, emotion, and environment — is in harmony, offering a united ahuti to the sacred fire of your Agni. And in return, that fire will give you what no diet plan or superfood can promise — true nourishment.

And let me be clear — this is not just theory, not just a “good habit” you can choose to adopt or ignore. As of today, this has become an essential practice to reverse many lifestyle diseases that medicines alone cannot fix. Diabetes, gut disorders, hormonal imbalances, autoimmune conditions — the list is long, and the root is often not just what you eat, but how you eat it. Every doctor, every nutritionist should be telling you this as a core healing hack. It may be the most underestimated practice in most households, but it is also, without question, one of the most powerful tools for real, lasting disease reversal.