digestive fire, and offers serious obstacles in the way of its digestion. The food thus digested with difficulty in the stomach creates discomforts and destroys all desire for a second meal. Insufficient diet gives but inadequate satisfaction, and tends to weaken the body. Over eating, on the contrary, is attended with such distressing symptoms, as languor, heaviness of the body, disinclination for movements, and distension of the stomach, accompanied by rumbling in the intestines, etc. Hence it behoves a man to take only as much food as he can easily digest, which should be well cooked and made to possess all the commendable (adequately nutritive) properties. Moderation in diet is the golden rule, besides taking into consideration the demerits of a particular food before partaking thereof and the nature of the time (day or night) it is eaten.
Boiled rice food (Annam) which is impure and dirty, infested with poison, or out of which another has eaten a portion as well as that which is full of weeds, pebbles, dust etc., which the mind instinctively repels, or cooked on the previous day or which has been kept standing over-night, as well as that which is insipid or emits a fetid smell, should be similarly rejected. Also food which has been cooked long ago, or has become cold and hard, and has been rewarmed or which has been imperfectly strained, or is burnt and insipid should also not serve as food. More
