Don't Bag Lunch

Here's a 5,000-year-old prescription for health and longevity: Quit running errands at lunchtime and eat a midday meal.

By Shubhra Krishan

A hardworking woman—let's call her Nancy—hits upon a strategy for fighting the midday slump. "I'll keep lunch very light—those really big sandwiches make me so drowsy," she says to herself. "Instead, I'll use my lunch break to jog to the market and buy organic groceries for dinner. Not only will I get some exercise, but then I'll have stuff for a healthy dinner. And I'll return to my desk energized."

Nancy sticks to her plan for an entire month, only to find that she's feeling worse than before she started her light-lunch program. She's tired, irritable, constipated, and not sleeping well most nights. Why? Ask an Ayurvedic physician and you'll likely hear that Nancy's symptoms are a predictable result of her decision to go easy on what should be her most important meal of the day: lunch.

Stoke your Engine
Think of your body as a steam engine. To get going in the morning, it needs a fire started in its belly and plenty of fuel to chug out of the station. Halfway through the day, when the fire has consumed most of its energy but the train needs to keep on rolling, the engine wants refueling. But if you're like the typical overly busy modern worker bee, you don't heap coal on the fire; instead, you starve your body, driving it to run on the morning's momentum—maybe tossing in a sugary treat and another hit of caffeine when you feel the power lag. Yes, your body rolls on, but it does so by burning up critical reserves. And finally, when it should be resting after a hard day's toil, you eat a big dinner, essentially throwing buckets of coal into a dying fire. The embers flare up, but the engine isn't going anywhere. Uselessly overheated, it creaks and groans all night, and in the morning, when it should be fresh and rested, it is reeling from the previous night's assault.

This isn't an exaggeration. Just as the siesta has gone by the wayside in most industrialized and developing countries, the leisurely lunch is a thing of the past in most of the United States. An average American office worker mows through lunch in half an hour or less and then indulges in a big evening meal, which sits in the belly for hours, interfering with a good night's sleep. Many people skip lunch altogether, with some 44 percent of the office population spending "lunch" time running errands, according to a 1996 Steelcase Workplace Index survey.

Fuel the Fire
The Ayurvedic word for digestive energy is agni, which means "fire." When this inner fire flares up, you feel hungry. When you eat, the fire consumes your food to make essential energy. Fuel agni on time and it rewards you with a bounce in your step. But neglect it and it starts to feed on whatever it can find, depleting energy you could have used for other purposes.

So how can you tell when to feed your digestive fire? Ancient Ayurvedic healers have made it easy. They observed that agni follows the same rhythm as the sun. It ignites in the morning, intensifies at noon, and dims in the evening. Hence their insistence on a power lunch. As for dinner, just as the dying sun cannot warm sea water, a subsiding agni cannot fully digest a big evening meal—even if it is a healthy one.

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