teaching our children good eating habits. Re-establishing this holistic eating includes having a variation of food types and tastes.

Inner Feeling & Short Term Effects
   After swallowing, that sense of well-being that we get from a meal is important. Neither a feeling of over-fullness nor one of incompleteness is desirable. A well cooked meal should leave you feeling satisfied in body and emotions for a reasonable length of time, say, 4 - 6 hours at least before needing to eat again. If you find yourself snacking within 2 - 3 hours of a meal, it definitely indicates that the meal did not fulfil you on some level. If a meal has been prepared with thought, cooked with skill, served with creativity, eaten in good mood, digested with proper function, and all this has been infused with a love of life and its richness of pleasures, then the result is sure to be fulfilment.
   The inner feeling is the immediate after effect of a meal. But if we also pay attention to the way we feel, for instance, within 10 minutes of having eaten, then 30 minutes, then 1 hour, then 3 hours, this will give a good indication of the benefits and deficits of the way we have eaten. For example, notice people who tend to lie down after a meal. This is a sure sign of low energy and sluggish digestion.
   It is not only from just having eaten too much, that is true, but it is a deeper symptom that shows a chronic weakness in the system. The body doesn't like lying down after food. It needs movement to keep the food going through. Lying down (or even just slouching on a comfy sofa, with one's feet up) is the lazy stomach's response to too much and too heavy food.
   Notice whether you feel like going to the toilet soon after a meal. This is a healthy response, as the brain should send messages (peristaltic waves) along the whole intestine to move through the previous meals, to make way for the recently eaten one. If you feel bloated in the stomach as well as blocked up in the bowels, it's not just the meal you recently ate, it is many previous ones that are the trouble as well.
   Flatulence is a common after effect for many people. It may come straight away, or some time after. It depends on which meal (or combination of meals) has been the cause. It may have been half-cooked food, a slow bowel, wrong combinations of food, too much liquid with a meal, or gulping too fast. There are a lot of possibilities and only you can sense the problems and the causes by awareness of inner and after-meal experiences.

The Long Term After Effects
   The real after effects of good or bad eating are the long term results. Many people think that they are born with certain physical pre-dispositions, and that around about mid-life, these hidden problems all pop up to show themselves. But, many, if not most of these are the delayed sum of many years bad eating and lifestyle habits (along with other factors like lack of exercise, mental patterns). These are the real after effects of meals: Chronic digestive problems, bowel cancers, weight problems, back problems, hypo and hyper-activity, depression, eating disorders, allergies and other food syndromes. The management of such illnesses needs much more than just changing the food in your cupboards for a few weeks. A whole lifestyle management program needs to be implemented, along with a prescription of some yogic cleansing techniques, and psychological methods such as relaxation and meditation.
   A balanced meal - and that is meant within the framework of all the other factors of the eating cycle as mentioned above - will satisfy long beyond the meal time, long after the stomach and bowels have done their job. Along with others like it, it will create a strong and healthy body, and a strong, creative mind. But a meal made in a rush, with highly processed foods, in a grubby kitchen, by a bad tempered or resentful person, without the proper balance of tastes, served in front of a war movie late at night, eaten with no awareness and only partly digested before bedtime will, along with others like it, only serve to degrade the body and mind until the limbs stiffen, the guts ache, the bowels block up, the mind becomes weak, and the spirit becomes lost.
   So if you can say that -
·   each meal fulfils you until the next one without desire for snacks,
·   you feel more like working and living day by day,
·   your bowels are flowing through (at 2 - 4 movements day),
·   your fertility cycle is regular and painless,
·   you can choose to miss a meal or two to regulate your energy,
·   creativity is your natural mode of self expression,
·   sleep comes easily at night, and waking comes easily in the morning
· the occasional blows from life don't phase you emotionally,
- then you can conclude that most things in your eating cycle and lifestyle must be balanced. This is the fullness and dynamism that yoga says is both desirable and possible.