The Fastest Growing Epidemic on the Planet

It’s the fastest growing epidemic on the planet,  but people remain unconcerned. Most of the time, it flies below the radar. Some people even catch the disease without knowing it, and live with the side effects for a long time.

The disease is devastating for spiritual growth. It first takes control of the body, making it thin and emaciated. Then the mind gets affected and, finally the soul. In just a few weeks, the entire mind – body – soul complex is obsessed with the disease. Once you get the disease you can think of nothing else and it becomes your only topic of conversation.It takes over your entire existence.

Little children are generally immune to it, but teen-agers can get infected very quickly. When they do, the get hit very hard. Middle aged people are even more susceptible and, somehow, women catch this epidemic more easily. Once infected the victim suffers for weeks and months and there is always the risk of a relapse. Even if the victim recovers quickly, variants are waiting to strike again.

Fifty years ago, the disease was unknown in India, except for one strain that had been around for thousands of years. However, not too many people got infected and recovery was swift.

All this has changed in recent years. Travellers are bringing it to India from across the world and it is also spreading through social media. There is no cure in sight and there is no vaccination against this dreadful virus.

Some of you may have guessed the name of this disease by now. If not, I will tell you. In one word, it is:

Dieting.

Yes, you read it right. Dieting is indeed a disease, and it is very, very infectious. If you don’t believe me just look at some of the symptoms listed below:

It is communicable, and spreads by human contact.
When we get it, we lose our sense of taste, much like some pandemics that we know. If food is tasty, it cannot be part of any dieting plan.
There is weight loss, as with any other kind of disease.
It mutates very quickly, much like a virus. When one form of diet becomes ineffective in damaging the body, people quick switch to another.
There is no known cure; prevention remains the best option.
If one person in a community catches it, all others are at risk, much like the pandemic we all know
Social distancing helps, but a six foot separation is not enough.
There is a ground zero for this disease; most cases originate in California, USA, where people are obsessed with following one diet or another.

Currently, the Keto version of this disease is sweeping across the world. The basic premise behind the Keto diet is to consume mostly plant-based proteins, lots of fats and very little carbohydrates.It works and the weight loss is very rapid. However, the food is so insipid that it is difficult to sustain this diet for very long.

This diet got a big boost from commercial interests who have developed fake keto food in lieu of real food. Common ingredients include fake sugar and a strange concoction known as cauliflower flour. None of it is tasty, because that would defeat the very purpose of the diet plan.  

The Keto diet is only a variant of the Atkins diet, popular in mid sixties. It was a high protein, high fat and zero carbs diet. Essentially, it had lots of meat and  eggs, deeply fried, and it created a lot of bad breath all over North America.

There are hundreds of diet variants around the world, including the Cave Man Diet. The premise, here, is that if you eat only what the cave man used to eat, you can stay really healthy, just like the cave man. Unfortunately, the cave men, or the Neanderthals, didn’t do all that well and faded away; other human  species did much better.

If you get tired of the cave man diet, you can try the South Beach diet and when this no longer meets your needs, you can jump to the  DASH diet or even the Word of Wisdom diet. I am not making this up, these diets actually exist, along with hundreds of other. Most surprisingly, there is also a Buddha diet, although Buddha himself had a very simple diet plan: eat whatever is given as alms.

India has its own version of  dieting, although the basic concept is much simpler. There are two kinds of food that make you sick, and these are, rightfully, called tamasic and rajasic. Note the word “sick” in both of them; our Rishis were far sighted. Avoid the sick diets and all that is left is sattvic.

You could, of course, go for a super sattvic diet, where you don’t eat anything grown below the ground; it probably makes some sense, to some people.

The only sure remedy for the dieting disease is prevention. As far as I know, there is only one prevention method that works; I call it the LTTB approach. In its full form, it is simply this:

Listen to the body (LTTB).

The body tells you exactly what to eat, it knows what is good for you. If you are sick, it tells you to eat less, or drink only liquids until the fever goes away. If you are healthy, it tells you to eat more. It also tells you exactly what to eat in any season if you listen hard enough.

I find that the best way to reach the LTTB stage is do yoga, or some other form of good physical exercise. Add some meditation and Sadhana practices, following Om Swami ji, and you can never go wrong. 

You may or may not lose weight but you will become more healthy and much more at peace with yourself, without running needlessly  from one diet plan to another.