This was during the 1970's. I used to go to a yoga camp in Moravia once a year. The camp always went from Saturday to Saturday. You could stay a week, or a couple of weeks.

We used to get up before 4 am, and do a sunrise meditation. We stayed up till after the sunset meditation, then went to sleep in the tents. I have great memories from those days.

Anyway, we ate three times a day. The main ingredient of our diet was wheat. No, not bread or cereal, just grains of wheat.

Everyone, including myself, thought it was a weird idea when we first learned about it. We all ended up loving it and coming back year after year.

The camp organizers (who worked under the auspices of the Unitarian Church in Prague) took special care to find wheat that was grown without the use of pesticides, as they wanted our diet to be completely natural.

They would soak the wheat in water for 2-3 days until just before it would start sprouting. Then they boiled it in water (no salt, sugar, etc) for about 20-30 minutes. They served it either with vegetables or fruit, three times a day. On the last day of the camp (Friday), they would serve it raw (but presoaked as usual).

It was truly delicious. It had a strange quality: Your body knew exactly how much you needed. They served each one of us a portion, but we were free to come back for seconds, thirds, whatever. For most of us, the one portion was just right. We knew how much we needed without any dietitian having to tell us. We were never hungry but we never felt that we had too much.

To convince us how well we were doing, they would serve spaghetti on Thursday night. On that occasion we would generally overeat, and suddenly feel all this heavy stuff in our tummies, just to awaken to the fact how great the wheat diet was for us.

Naturally, wheat is a great source of fiber, so the week always had a very positive cleansing effect on our digestive systems.

As for drinking, all we drank during the week was water. No soda, no milk, no coffee, not even tea.

It's not something most of us would eat all year long (I enjoy rice and tea way too much for that), but doing it for one week of the year was a very healthy thing to do. Of course, spending the week in nature and practicing yoga three times a day, as well as hours of meditation helped, too.

Try it someday (or someweek). You may really fall in love with it.

Log in or register to write something here or to contact authors.