Make lunch your biggest meal

If you read Your most productive day, you already know to make lunch the main meal of your day. But you’ve most likely also heard the saying: ‘Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper’. So which meal should really be the main meal of your day: breakfast, lunch or dinner - which one is it?

One thing everyone agrees on is that dinner should be kept light. As the day progresses, your metabolism tends to take a dip, and it becomes increasingly tough to digest what you eat; therefore, it is a wise idea to reduce portion size during the evening. Consuming heavy meals later in the day not only hampers digestion, but it also comes in the way of your sleep and also results in toxin overload, due to which you wake up tired the next day. There are plenty of ways you can make your dinner interesting while keeping it light. Opt for soups, stews, and grilled dishes.

If you should think of dinner as easing into the night’s sleep, Ayurveda also believes you should think of breakfast as easing into the day. Breakfast is meant to gently break the night’s fast with light nourishment rather than bog the digestive system with a high calorie-intake.

With a light breakfast & dinner in mind, Ayurveda recommends that lunch be the largest meal of the day, since that is the time your digestion is working at its maximum potency, when the sun is highest in the sky. Your body is wired according to the movement of sun and your digestive power is naturally at its highest when the sun is the strongest. Eating anywhere between noon-2PM makes your body more efficient at breaking down foods, absorbing nutrients and eliminating waste. Midday is also the time when your body is the most active, and can burn off the carbs as energy rather than storing them as fat.

Since it’s not just what you eat, but also how and WHEN you eat that matters, we encourage you to make lunch your biggest meal and you’ll feel a big difference in your day and your digestion.