Why You Should Eat for Mental and Spiritual Fitness

Diet certainly impacts our physical well-being. Weekend jocks and Olympic athletes are becoming ever more attuned to what and when to eat for maximum performance. Less focused on is the impact food has on spiritual and mental fitness.

Among the most common question I am asked as a navy rabbi is “what is kosher?” Wrongly believed to mean food is blessed, the Jewish dietary rules explain which foods may be eaten and how they must be prepared. Like any discipline, keeping kosher is about improving fitness, in this case spiritual health. For example, blood has to be drained from meat. To eat what the Bible calls the life force of an animal impairs a person’s ability to connect with G-d.

Of course, others view this differently. Native Americans ate the heart of a bison to gain a measure of its good qualities: bravery, endurance, and strength, as well as to thank the essence or spirit of a creature from which one has taken. In both these examples, while nutrition may play a part, spiritual sustenance is the paramount concern.

Research shows that certain foods improve mental acuity. While coffee drinkers know they are sharper after their first cup, Joy Bauer also identifies beets, fish, berries, lean protein, and walnuts as brain healthy foods.

Food can also help you learn to take risks. Did you hate brussels sprouts as a kid? Me too. But when I tried them again as an adult I found they were not the traumatic experience I remembered. Now I love them. As I have matured my tastes have changed so it makes sense to try foods again. Likewise, though I failed at certain tasks before I need to risk trying them again if I want to succeed.

“You are what you eat,” said Victor Lindlahr in his 1942 book You Are What You Eat: How to Win and Keep Health with Diet. But more than a century earlier, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante: "Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es," meaning “tell me what you eat, I will tell you what you are.” To the famed epicure, diet is indicative of a person’s state of mind.

Question – What do you eat to improve your mental and spiritual fitness?
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