Free What Are You Hungry For? by Deepak Chopra Page A

these simple foods became part of a magical memory.
    Yet on their own, peas are peas, bread is bread, and butter is butter. The amount of calories they contain is fixed and unchanging, no matter whether you pull them out of your refrigerator, where they’ve been sitting awhile, or eat them at the peak of freshness. But we are sensitive on other levels, and each one has its own energy signature. There’s no scientific measure to tell you why a freshly plucked rose handed to you by someone you love isn’t the same as a refrigerated rose packaged in a plastic sheath at the supermarket. There’s no way to quantify this, but the energy is certainly different.
    When you look at the whole package of
energy,
the food you eat should match the story you want to live, which means:
    As fresh as possible, without dullness, repetition, and routine.
    As colorful as possible, giving delight to the eyes. Food is a rainbow brought down to earth.
    As cheerful as possible, maximizing moments of happiness and pleasure. There’s wisdom in the Jewish proverb, “Better to eat straw in a manger than a feast in a house of discord.”
    It’s ironic that many Americans feel they have to go abroad to enjoy eating. They bask in the slow lunches that take hours on a terrace in Tuscany. They feel excited in a Parisian café where pride in cooking and eating can be felt in the air. By contrast, eating at home tends to be quick, efficient, and routine. Fuel gets put into your stomach. Otherwise, there is no nourishment to the senses or the soul. The modernist architect Le Corbusier called a house “a machine for living,” which sounds rather bleak. It’s just as bleak when meals turn into pit stops for refueling.
    Your body isn’t looking for fuel the way a diesel truck is. It’s looking for a myriad of nutrients. The ones that work as fuel are few and easy to outline:
    Carbohydrates
convert quickly into energy as measured through blood sugar levels.
    Proteins
break down into energy more slowly and are largely used to rebuild cells, not for providing energy you can feel.
    Fats
are directed to be stored in the body and take the longest time to turn into energy.
    To a nutritionist, carbohydrates are the body’s basic fuel and should form the largest segment of everyone’s daily diet. A small amount of protein is needed every 24 hours to rebuild tissues (about 3 to 6 ounces, which is much less than most people assume; one sizable portion of lean fish is adequate). Fats are necessary but can bereduced to as little as 1 to 2 tablespoons a day of added oils without harming your health; in fact, severe fat restriction is the only known way to reverse clogged coronary arteries—your body won’t call upon these crannies of hardened fat unless deprived of any other source in your diet.
    Into this clear picture all kinds of confusion has been introduced, particularly regarding carbohydrates. Decades ago, athletes who ate at the training table were given red meat, on the assumption that increased protein was necessary to build muscle mass, and with more muscles, an athlete should be able to reach maximum performance. But in a series of experiments performed at Yale University, two groups of athletes were put on exercise bicycles and told to pedal to the point of exhaustion. The athletes who performed best weren’t the ones who ate protein but the ones who ate carbohydrates before a game. The practice of “carbing up” was born.
    In order to give you quick energy, carbs are processed by insulin produced in the pancreas, a rapid-fire mechanism that takes mere seconds if you drink a soda or any other form of sucrose, the simplest of sugars and the fastest to enter your system. It seems that a lot of problems would be averted if Americans didn’t load their bodies with refined, or simple sugar. In nature, carbs are complex. They take longer to break down, which helps even out blood sugar, while refined white sugar causes blood sugar to spike. Just as