According to Osho, diet and mind are linked: stimulating or intoxicating foods excite and dull awareness, becoming obstacles to meditation, while simple, non-stimulating foods support it. Yet he insists the primary lever is consciousness, not food rules. Quiet the mind through meditation and your cravings will naturally shift; then diet changes are effortless, authentic, and aligned with spiritual growth.
Calm your mind first, and your taste for exciting, intoxicating foods will fade, making a simpler diet easy and natural.
From the Discourses
Passages where Osho speaks to this question — each links to the complete discourse.
Osho, does diet have an effect on the mind?
Some foods are stimulating; they create excitement. All of them are obstacles in spiritual life. Some foods are non-stimulating; they do not arouse excitement. They support spiritual life. Some foods are intoxicating, giving a kind of inebriation; some are non-intoxicating. Intoxicating and stimulating foods are obstacles in spiritual life. But our craving for intoxicating, stimulating foods—the taste for them, the urge within to take them—will dissolve through meditation. As the mind begins to grow quiet, the diet will begin to change accordingly. Recently such incidents have occurred around me. Some friends were meat-eaters. When they first came to me they immediately asked, “We eat meat; you won’t make it a condition of meditation that we must give it up? We can’t give it up.” I told them, I don’t talk about diet at all. Eat whatever you like, enjoy it; I have nothing to do with it. But begin meditation.…
Osho, here the urge to eat becomes very strong.
Yes. It is the very craving to eat that makes eating unbalanced. How much food is actually needed is put aside, and the relish of eating becomes more important. Very few of us feed the body; most of us feed the tongue. Taste is not a requirement of the body; taste is the mind’s lust. And because of taste we overeat. If you act a little consciously, this won’t happen. Be a little more aware and keep the simple remembrance that what you eat should be beneficial for the body as well as agreeable to the mind; it is not as difficult as we imagine. And if the desire to eat more arises, it is better to chew much more. Then you will eat for a longer time. After all, what pleasure can there be in eating for half an hour? For half an hour one keeps experiencing taste. So…
Our wrong attitudes towards food are becoming dangerous for us. They are proving to be very costly. They have taken us to a point where we are somehow just alive. Our food does not seem to create health in us, it seems to create sickness. It is a surprising situation when food starts making us sick. It is as if the sun rising in the morning creates darkness. This would be an equally surprising and strange thing to happen. But all the physicians in the world are of the opinion that most of the diseases of man are because of his wrong diet. So the first thing is that every person should be very aware and conscious about his eating. And I am saying this especially for the meditator.
Question: OM. THAT IS WHOLE, AND THIS ALSO IS WHOLE. FOR ONLY THE WHOLE IS BORN OUT OF THE WHOLE; AND WHEN THE WHOLE IS TAKEN FROM THE WHOLE, BEHOLD, THE REMAINDER IS WHOLE. OM. PEACE, PEACE, PEACE. So the first thing is: hyperoxygenate. Let there be an abundance of oxygen in you. Remember this throughout these seven days. Two or three things will happen if you do this, but don't be afraid of them. When you start breathing deeply, your sleep will become shorter. This is not something to worry about. When sleep is deep and sound, its duration decreases, and as you begin to breathe more deeply, the depth of your sleep will increase also. This is why those who do hard physical work sleep so soundly at night.
Our beloved master,
YOU WERE JUST TALKING ABOUT FOOD, AND NOW IN THE WEST FOOD IS A BIG CULT. IT'S ONE OF THE THINGS COMING IN AS A BASIS OF SPIRITUALITY. YOU SAID IF WE'RE NATURAL, WE'LL KNOW WHAT TO EAT AND WHEN TO EAT, BUT NOW WE ARE OUT OF TOUCH WITH OUR CHILDLIKE NATURE. ALSO, MANY RELIGIONS SAY THAT THE FOOD YOU EAT DOES MAKE A DIFFERENCE TO ONE'S SPIRITUAL PATH. IS THERE ANYTHING YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT FOOD AS A GUIDE FOR THE WEST? It is the other way round: food cannot make you spiritual, but if you are spiritual your food habits will change. Eating anything will not make much difference. You can be a vegetarian and cruel to the extreme, and violent; you can be a non-vegetarian and kind and loving. Food will not make much difference. In India there are communities who have lived totally with…