Today’s Dadly Daily Declaration comes from Chapter 12 (titled Eat Dinner Like a King) of Aubrey Marcus‘ book, Own The Day, Own Your Life. This chapter focuses on, well, dinner. As Marcus states: After any good battle, the warrior looks forward to a feast.
Marcus believes dinnertime has two objectives: (1) enjoy yourself, and (2) get ready to have sex. Dinner should be a celebration of a day fully owned, according to him. In this chapter, Marcus continues with his Universal Nutrition Principles, listed below:
- Universal Nutrition Principle #7: What you think about food matters.
- If we tell our body something is poison, it becomes more poisonous. If we convince ourselves that it its healthy, it becomes more healthy.
- Universal Nutrition Principle #8: Nutrition is only as good as digestion.
- Eat slow, chew hard
- Take smaller bites
- Universal Nutrition Principle #9: Cheat like a Pro
One thing that stands out in this chapter is a section titled, “Say Grace Like a Scientist!”. In this section, Marcus uses an example from Aldous Huxley’s novel Island, in which Huxley talks about saying grace as an act of gratitude to be done not with words but with your senses. The idea is similar to Charles Eisenstein‘s in his book, The Yoga of Eating. Marcus has borrowed this concept and applied it to his life, leading us today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Before you eat, prepare the very best bite on your fork. Take a moment to look deeply at all the food on your plate. Think about where it came from. Think about the energy required to grow that food – the nutrients, the sunlight, the other plants and animals ingested by your food. Take time to bring yourself to a state of mindfulness and reduced stress. Think about how that energy will translate to energy in your own body and what your are going to need that energy for.
As you put the bite in your mouth, if the food is lacking in any of these categories, forgive it. You never want to think that what you’re about to eat is poison, or bad for you, or will ruin your diet. Instead, tell your body that what it is about to eat is nourishment. Then look at the food, smell the food, and savor it. When you taste it, chew it until there is nothing left, and your tastebuds have flirted with every ingredient in this orgy of flavor.
That should be your first bite, and how you say grace: it’s a piece of mindfulness, a nutrition reinforcer, and a way through the placebo to ensure that your food will be digested and absorbed optimally.
