When I visited megalopolis cities like New York City in the US and Mumbai city in India,
Probably my number one treatment intervention for the patients that I was seeing from a variety of diseases was to have an earlier dinner and a lighter dinner.
This was the treatment for a vast array of clinical presentations,
Symptoms,
Diseases.
So let's explore why you should have a light dinner,
An earlier dinner,
And why it should be low in protein.
I'm Dylan Smith,
An Aoretic Practitioner and Holistic Health Educator.
Thank you for joining me on Insight Timer.
And I want to ask you this question,
Yeah,
I'm talking to you.
Why do you eat food?
All right,
A bunch of reasons.
Probably the first thing that came to your mind is it's tasty.
That was me.
I could do with some tasty food now.
But the primary reason of why you eat food,
For fuel.
Food gets digested,
Hopefully well,
And that allows the mitochondria,
The powerhouse of the cells to produce ATP,
Adenosine triphosphate,
Which is the energy you require to function in life.
If you use this energy,
Like in the case of your daily activities,
That's great.
You're spending this energy currency well.
But if you just go to sleep after eating,
Because your use of energy dramatically drops during sleep,
You don't have anything to spend this ATP on,
And you hoard it.
And hoarding,
According to the Vedic system,
According to the laws of nature,
Is never good.
Because maintenance,
That maintenance energy of hoarding attracts destruction.
So this ATP over accumulates,
Which increases free radicals and reactive oxygen and mitochondrial damage.
So you want to finish eating at least two to three hours before you go to sleep.
And that's ideally before 10 p.
M.
We've got whole inside timer tracks and courses on optimizing sleep.
So when you reestablish fat metabolism,
That is you are using your fuel overall in a sustainable way.
You're using your inner fuel.
You're not relying on,
I'll just have a quick hit of chocolate or a quick coffee or organic fruit or organic nuts,
Organic dried fruit,
These quick injection of stimulants.
Your brain is relying on these for fuel.
But when you have your inner fat metabolic fuel established,
You may not even require dinner at all.
And that may become a healthy habit.
But as a culture,
We have lost the ability to burn fat as fuel.
Instead,
We're using sugar.
We're using these quick injection of stimulants,
These organic chocolates,
Organic nuts,
Raisins,
Coffee,
Etc.
So if you're snacking for quick hits of energy,
This indicates that you've lost the ability to burn your calm and stable source of fuel.
So I've got other tracks on inside timer on how to reduce snacking and excess eating.
And why is eating high protein meal at dinner a bad idea?
Well,
Protein activates an anabolic pathway,
Which is a pathway which builds the tissues.
And that pathway is called mTOR activation.
And this specifically causes you to build muscle tissue.
Of course,
You need mTOR activation,
But it should not be continuous.
The primary problem when you eat a heavy dinner is it suppresses an important metabolic process called autophagy,
Which literally means self devouring.
And autophagy is the opposite to anabolic activity.
It is breaking down.
It processes cells,
It disassembles unnecessary or dysfunctional components of the cell.
So autophagy is the catabolic,
It's the reduction.
And if autophagy is impaired,
This can cause cancer.
This can cause excess tissue,
Which is cancer,
That excess growth.
Excess protein can increase the risk of cancer.
So when a tissue or a datu in Ayurveda,
We call it,
When a tissue increases,
It can lead to growths.
And there's an ancient shloka in Ayurveda,
Which says flesh increases flesh,
Mamsa var than a mamsam.
So excess protein in some cases can even be more dangerous than excess glucose.
You don't want to be eating this heavy tissue increasing food at the night time.
Your digestive fire is regulated by the sun.
When the sun is the strongest,
Your digestion is the strongest.
So eat your biggest meal at lunch.
When the sun is down,
Your digestive strength is low.
So eat light.
I'll paint you the scenario of what happens if you sleep after a heavy dinner.
When you sleep on top of a big dinner,
Your heart rate goes down,
Your respiratory rate,
Your metabolic rate,
It all slows down,
Which causes food to linger in your system without it being digested.
Then you wake up in a state of indigestion with this undigested food,
Toxic material deposited somewhere in your body.
And then you think,
Apparently I've heard breakfast is the most important meal of the day.
And you put another truckload on top of that.
Then you walk around feeling blocked and inflamed.
You create vascular inflammation,
Congestion,
Your sinuses are blocked.
You are barely awake because you are feeling dull and heavy.
You don't even have the desire to be having a big lunch like you should because you're so out of tune.
Then you add massive doses of caffeine to give you energy,
Which further suppresses your digestive strength through dehydrating it.
It causes improper appetite and it further disconnects you from your own metabolic fuel,
Your fat metabolism.
So they call it supper for a reason.
Supper comes from the old French word super,
Meaning evening meal.
That is where we get the name soup from.
Supper should be light.
It should be a supplementary meal,
Not the main meal.
Soup is a great choice.
So moving forward,
Action steps,
Tips to transition to a light dinner.
Have a good,
Solid,
Warm cooked lunch.
Eat that lunch in a relaxed manner so you are properly nourished and satisfied.
There you can re-establish fat metabolism and you won't be having that craving as needing such a big meal at night.
Learn to wind down from your day with techniques like meditation,
Pranayama,
Loving relationships.
These activities you can do before dinner.
Incorporate healthy fats in your diet like ghee,
Clarified butter as your cooking oil and even on your food that can satiate you and fulfill that fat metabolism easier.
Eat an earlier dinner.
Eat whole foods rather than processed foods at dinner.
If you're going to eat takeaway,
If you're going to eat dessert,
If you're going to eat meat,
Fish or eggs,
Stick that having at lunchtime.
Avoid those foods at dinner.
Dinner should just be a vegetarian dish,
Something like a soup or the famous Ayurvedic dish called kichari or a light vegetarian dish.
And of course,
How you eat is important.
So it's not only about what you eat but how.
Unless you're eating crap,
But how are you eating in a ritual,
You're eating in a relaxed manner and that is going to enable you to digest it.
If you did have a heavy dinner,
I do it also.
I like to go out,
I love my restaurant food,
But I do it occasionally.
And when I do,
Ayurveda says when you have a heavy food meal and too heavy,
Skip the next meal.
So skip the breakfast.
So ideally,
And I hope you can implement these practices and these shifts in your digestion to align with the sun because your digestive fire,
Which is the center of your body,
Is governed by the sun,
Just like the sun is the center of the solar system.
So align with the sun,
Align with nature's rhythms.
That is what Ayurvedic medicine is about.
Ayurveda is about living in tune with nature's rhythms so you can live in tune with your own human nature.
And that is where perfect health lies because our human biology is run on rhythms and our human nature is in tune with nature and in tune with the sun.
So I hope that you can wake up effortlessly so that you can jump out of bed with energy and enthusiasm and even with a slight hunger and fire in the belly.
Enjoy your supper.
If you have any questions on this topic or this matter,
Please leave a comment or review on this Insight Timer track and I'll get back to you.
Until next track,
Much love.
