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Bharat Savur

It's important not to overload or deprive your liver of food to maintain a perfect energy balance.

After every workout session, I ask my students, "How do you feel?" and if the answer is "good" or "fresh", I know they're maintaining the perfect energy balance. When calorie-intake balances calorie-output, you feel stretched and uplifted.

If the answer is "tired" or "weak", it means they're eating too much or too little, or following wrong eating patterns that create a calorie glut or deficit and decrease energy-levels.

In fact, exercising is an excellent barometer to track your liveliness. On the days Nitin comes for his workout straight from a puja, he is pooped because of the ghee-filled prasad he breakfasts on. Fat creates an instant calorie-surplus that makes the body use so much energy for digestion that it has little to spare for other activities. That's why Nitin feels dull for the next few hours. And, of course, the indigestible fat gets stored and his weight increases or remains unchanged after exercising.

Malini, wedded to her two fasting days a week, worries me for a different reason. She creates a calorie-deficit that alerts her body to impending weakness where it slows down its metabolism. So, at night, when she breaks her fast with one "proper" meal, the sluggish metabolism does not generate sufficient energy.

Result: she feels lethargic while the body stores the unmetabolised food as fat. Malini does show a weight-loss on her scales, but I fear it's more muscle-loss than fat-loss. And depleted muscle means weakness, which Malini complains of.

While Nitin and Malini may feel virtuous about their prasads and fasts, I'm afraid each one's liver is going through a pretty tough time. Fat defeats its — that's why even on-drinkers get weak livers. It thrives on carbs like whole grains and yes, per day, it can and does store about 400 calories of glycogen — energy derived from these carbs. So, when Malini fasts, it sustains her system for about three hours. But, after that, her starving body turns to its secondary system to maintain its energy-giving blood-sugar level.

The secondary system is the muscle. And from a health and fitness point of view, this starts a disastrous process. The body cannibalises for muscle for sugar thus depleting our strength. The metabolic rate drops thus decreasing our ability to generate energy. The body becomes a fat-storer instead of a fat-burner thus setting us up for weight-gain. Ultimately, it's not about valuing our muscle and metabolism but valuing our well-being.

Both Nitin and Malini insist that their prasad and fast respectively are "a mind-thing". I know. The puja and fast are about cleansing, becoming fresh, alive, alert, aware, so that we live from the very core of our vibrant being. Their very essence lies in removing unnecessary blocks so that the necessary life-forces flow stingingly through us. When we access this pure essence, this free flow through the chanting in a puja or the discipline of a fast, now, why block it with excess substances or conversely, subject ourselves to extreme deprivation and deplete it?

Yes, it is "a mind-thing". So are fiction and fantasy. The mind creates, imagines, fantasies and can believe anything. It's a beautiful asset. However, for this very reason, a large part of it is also shaped by society, and by tradition. But, the brain is different. An excellent bio-computer, it belongs to no society, no institution, and no creed. However, convinced the mind is that a fat-filled prasad or a fast is divine, the brain dulls and functions under-par when over sated or undernourished. It needs a steady three-hourly trickle of glucose to be at its sharpest.

So, if the creative mind paid attention to this science of reality, it could in all its poetic beauty and grace re-invent the path to the divine. Offer fresh fruit-prasad to the body. Offer short three-hourly fasts to the body. In re-inventing, the mind would note the new, fresh energy awakening in brain and body, and the old disturbances of lethargy and dullness subsiding effortlessly, and experience a rapturous re-creation of itself suspended in radiance.

Note: it's still `a mind-thing'. Only its texture is softer, sweeter, and lighter. Once you experience it, know it, you will radiate love, life, creativity, and poetry. Your words will reflect universality, your body language will reflect the grace of belonging, your silence will contain the song of serenity, and your movements will reflect the celebration of being.

This is perfect energy balance — where calories come and go leaving you in the glow of suspension — richer in mind, stronger in muscle, and faster in metabolism — a state of total upliftment. This is your mind-thing, not set by others. No overloading, no deprivation, just the freedom of pure living in your being.

Remember, the liver needs a fatless three-hourly snack to pep up the brain; the muscles need water and protein; the bones, calcium; the mind needs a dissolution of prejudices and judgements to rise into loving acceptance. In this balance lies the presence of the divine.

The writer is co-author of the book, `Fitness for Life'.

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