What I Learned About My Food Habits From The Ohsawa #7 Diet

Recently, I had the opportunity to do the Ohsawa diet #7. If you haven't heard of this special diet, it's based on the recommendation by macrobiotics researcher George Ohsawa. I learned a lot about my food habits, and my relationship to food through this diet.

Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash

Transcript

Hello everyone! I hope that you're doing amazing wherever you are in the world. My name is Bhoomshakar and I welcome you to my channel. As always I'm so grateful that you're listening, Subscribing and commenting. I really appreciate the support. I am grateful to be able to share knowledge and different techniques and experiments that I run on myself with you guys and I wanted to share another experiment that I've been running on myself or I ran on myself in this video. So recently from June 1st to June 10th I did a 10-day OSAWA diet, Diet number 7. OSAWA is a diet that was created by George Osawa who is a Japanese macrobiotic individual who believes in macrobiotics. He's a Japanese. . . I don't know if he's a scientist or a researcher. I have no idea. I haven't looked into his background but the yoga school that I am affiliated with or the one that I am kind of learning under, A lot of them have done the OSAWA diet many times over and have gotten brilliant results from it. So I decided you know let me do one as well. So obviously they went for the most strictest version of the diet and that's diet number 7. So there's different levels to it. And diet number 7, Basically what you do is for 10 days. Now I'm not saying everyone should go ahead and do this obviously. It's a very difficult diet and also I'm sure very difficult in the body. And I don't know if everyone's gonna be capable of keeping up with it also. It might not be good for everyone. So of course you got to consult your doctor before doing anything. I'm not an expert. I'm just sharing my experience with you guys. So what do you do on the diet is that you only eat whole wheat, Buckwheat, Millet or brown rice or white rice, Boiled or baked with salt and water only for those 10 days. So you're not eating anything else. You're not putting in spices into it which was a big deal for me being an Indian and loving my spices. So only thing that you can use is sea salt and water obviously. And all you can do is boil these things or bake them. You can only use these four grains wheat, Millet, Rice and buckwheat. Okay so I'd never heard of buckwheat before. I never used it and so I was like let me use buckwheat. So I bought a bunch of buckwheat and that's what I used. So mostly what I ate was buckwheat boiled with water. And a few rice noodles thrown into him or like rice thrown into it so like a mix or I ate flatbread that my mom would make from me from whole wheat without anything else except salt and water. Yeah so those are the things that I ate. It was kind of interesting because of so many interesting things are associated with food. You guys already probably know this. We use food for a lot of different things other than nourishing ourselves. You know it's kind of fascinating how food is supposed to be a thing that you know sustains us and it keeps us going and it's the fuel for all of the cells that are in the body. But we use as human beings because we have such an abundance of food nowadays in a lot of the countries that I'm speaking about. We use food in a lot of different ways. We use food as a way of numbing ourselves from our feelings or we use food as a way of rewarding ourselves for things that we've done or haven't done or you know to placate ourselves to make ourselves feel better. You know the sugar or the carbs in our food makes us feel like all right everything is fine. Everything might be falling apart but at least I have my food. But on the Osama diet because it's so restrictive but it's not restrictive in the sense that I ever felt hungry. In fact I was always full because the stuff that's on it is very filling the buckwheat especially and the buckwheat is considered a superfood so it has a lot of nutritional value in it that I never felt like I was deprived in any way. But I definitely did feel like I was upset about the fact that there were so many foods out there and I'd go on Instagram and I look at all these foods. I deliberately I don't know why I did this to myself but I deliberately went on Instagram and looked at foods and I was like at least if I can't eat them at least I can look at them. But you know I'd look at all these foods and it was like why am I doing this to myself? I live in a country where I have enough food. Why am I doing this to myself? I'm healthy enough. Why am I doing this to myself? And so I made up all these stories and I started playing the victim role and I started crying about the whole situation and things all that. I mean crying not literally but you know more like inside metaphorically. But it was interesting to me as I said that it was interesting to notice how food has such an association in our lives with so many different things. I couldn't sit and eat my parents as much anymore because are my family because they were eating different kinds of food and I didn't want to really tempt myself or you know eat buckwheat in front of them and be like oh this is so terrible right? And so I usually ate in my room by myself and so of course that was a disconnection from my family that I was like oh it's just temporary it's fine but it still hurt. Also I was eating a lot of foods that they had flavor and in fact like as time went on I understood the flavors more and more so. But in the beginning there was no spice to it and there's no chili and I'm chilies like my friend. I put chili into everything and turmeric and all those beautiful spices that there was nothing in there and so again there was a lot of understanding and a lot of emotional stripe that had to go through before I was like you know actually this food is not that bad it tastes pretty good if I could just go beyond my mind and really actually taste the food. Now there's a lot of benefits to those that are dying you know your skin gets clearer they say that every day 10% of your blood gets purified and the yin and yang energies in your body gets balanced which is a big one for me I noticed that I was much calmer on the diet and I wasn't as emotionally led around by my nose you know all these things were happening around me and I was able to stay focused and and steady and centered in my body and so there's a lot of other benefits to those other diet that I would implore you to go online and research obviously there are those Sava macrobiotic foundations and things like that so you can go and check those foundations out they have books on those have a diet this diet as I said is the number seven diet but there's many other diets there's you number one two three four there's all these levels so you can go very strict or you can be very lenient about it you can add other things to the diet as well but in general if you are the kind of person who has a little bit of an issue with food or has emotional eating problems and things like that not that I'm saying you do the diet but I think you should go research emotional eating and OSAWA diet and their connection with that because what happens as I said on those Sava diet is that it's very hard to numb yourself or reward yourself for this kind of food and it's buckwheat you know you're not gonna reward yourself with that stuff and it's very hard to numb yourself with it as well as I said because you're not it's not carbs like it's not carb heavy it's not like sugar heavy it's just very bland and you know it's just not something that you use normally or typically to numb yourself so you're feeling all your feelings you're feeling all your emotions you're feeling everything but you're able to be stable because again your Yang energies are being balanced so you're really able to feel the feelings but not be led around with them not but not be like following them like in your monkey mind you're able to say steady and you're able to experience them and I thought that it was brilliant because I was able to meditate better I was able to be more calm or I was able to go deeper into my yoga and into my ass and lands into my poses and even at work I was able to really integrate myself in that work and really be steady with it and not get distracted be focused and even though I wasn't eating that much right also in general I at the end of it I didn't even feel that hungry anymore because my body obviously my stomach had shrunk a lot but also my body didn't require as much food because a lot of the food I was eating probably right now and in general I'm eating is to numb myself and to reward myself it's not really food that I need in order to sustain myself in order to keep me myself going right it's not that kind of food it has other values to me I'm not using it because I have a certain caloric need of the day I'm using it because oh it's delicious and I want to stuff myself with it right and so for me at least those our diet was a revelation of sorts and the way I eat in the way I distract myself at food the way I mindlessly eat sometimes I a lot of times even though it was just buckwheat or whole wheat bread I just be sitting there I'm mindlessly chewing on it and I'd always have to pull myself back because one of the things about those our diet is you try to be very mindful with the food that you put into your body so when you're sitting there you're actually eating and you're paying attention to eat bite trying to chew it at least 20 30 40 times I didn't show it 40 times I think I chewed maybe 20 times each bite but sometimes I get distracted and I go into my head and I forget that I'm supposed to chew that many times and then I bring my myself back and it's kind of fascinating to notice how food whatever it was supposed to mean for us when we first you know on planet now it means completely different it has taken on a completely different form for us it means completely different things for us it hasn't have the same connotation for us and so it's our diet for me at least taught me a lot about my food habits and how they were actually very terrible and I was able to kind of improve upon them a lot obviously health wise I felt a lot better after and even after when I it's been eight days since I finished even now I notice a major change in my metabolism and my digestion it's much faster and much more smoother my skin is much better my eyes you know are much brighter and it's just in general my continents has my characteristic my personality has changed a lot it's become calmer and smoother of course these are just temporary changes perhaps and you know I'll go back to being normal again but it's nice to see that food can have such a magnanimous effect on their entirety of our body our personality our spirit everything and so I'm not as I said recommending that everyone do those Savadah at number seven but I do recommend that you go online and check it out it is fascinating I've never heard of it before before the yoga school taught me about it and so it's fascinating that this individual George of Sava was able to come up with such a brilliant technique and share it with the world and I still had no idea it existed right so I'm guessing a lot of you perhaps haven't heard of it as well and so I wanted to share it with you if you have heard of it and if you've done it I would love to hear from you and your experiences of it again go online and check out the books on it and read it before jumping into the into doing the diet it's really important that you understand why you're doing it and what benefit it'll have for your body before doing something so stringent and so restrictive especially if it's not suitable for you right so I'm not recommending that everyone do it I'm not a doctor I cannot recommend this stuff I'm just sharing my experience I hope this makes sense again I'm so grateful that you listened and you subscribe and you're supporting me in so many different amazing ways if you have any questions about this comment below and I shall do a follow-up video again thank you so much and I shall see you then next time around bye for now