"Without Conscious Human Beings, Every Empowerment Will Lead To Newer Disaster."
~ Sadhguru
I want to add a note about the 4:30PM cut-off time on eating. This is the most hated/loved portion of the program. For many this feels like an impossible ask, but even for those that once felt it impossible, this can become the greatest gift when implemented consciously.
There are too many reasons to reasonably list as to why this is beneficial , so I'm going to focus in on just a few.
Sleep - The standard eat dinner at 7PM go to bead at 9-10PM plan means that our digestive processes are functioning at their max level just as we lay down to sleep. (It takes about six to eight hours for food to pass through your stomach and small intestine.)
Most of us don't think about the energy we use to digest because it is an autonomous function of the body, but digestion accounts for about 5-15% of our total energy use.
While you are sleeping, you want your body to be 100% focused on rest/repair, and if you've forced your body to use 5-15% of its energy elsewhere (digestion), this can significantly decrease the quality of your sleep.
Energy - What is worse is that low-quality sleep actually forces you to increase your energy expenditure the following day , which further depletes your onhand energy reserves.
On the other hand, when we stop eating at 4:30PM our body can actually gain access to energy reserves in the form of body fat. Most of the time (in 2023 anyway) our bodies have access to excess glucose (Carbohydrates & proteins) and thus for 99% of American's our bodies are using glucose as our energy source. However when our body doesn't have access to glucose, it breaks down fat, and produces a compound called ketones. The ketones can also become your body and brain's main source of energy. Our bodies actually function much more efficiently on ketones than they do on glucose.
Cell Health - That efficiency comes from evolutionary responses programmed into our DNA. When our bodies are without glucose, they change. I think of this change as an internal "getting our act together" moment. Essentially the body starts to clean itself up. Part of this process is an upregulation of 'autophagy' or cell death. Autophagy allows your body to kill off old inefficient cells, break them down and reuse the cell parts to create new cells that can operate more efficiently. This can be incredibly important because most of us can go without ever being without food. If we keep pumping nutrients into our bodies we can keep old cells alive nearly perpetually. These old cells, deplete our bodies of efficiency and thus energy, making us feel tired.
Conscious Empowerment - Finally with that little bit of science backstory, I want to offer the thing I think can be one of the most empowering parts of the entire program. The feeling of hunger combined with the conscious choice to deprive your body of alleviating that feeling is a window into your internal conversation.
Most of us have the financial resources that prevent us from having real unfulfilled wants. Generally, if we have a desire for something, we live in a world where we can have it. Our brain adapts to this experience of want/have and applies that to all aspects of our life, especially to the food aspect of our life.
By putting a time marker on the day we are taking a conscious action to push our non-conscious desires (food/sugar cravings) below our conscious desires (live longer, healthier, look better, feel better). We are reordering the hierarchy of our life to prioritize the things we consciously want, over the things that we tend to unconsciously crave.
When I first started working on this program, whenever I found myself with a craving after 4:30PM I found it really helpful to derive pleasure from knowing my conscious desires were creating the new me.
I'm so happy to have you along for this journey, and I'm super proud of the questions and work we have done already.