OPTIMIZE YOUR DIGESTIVE POWER
There’s a great word in Ayurveda that describes the power of your digestion – agni – literally, your digestive fire. It’s all very well talking about the foods we get to enjoy, but if your digestive system is struggling, you’ll be unable to absorb all the wonderful nutrients from the food you’re eating.
If this book represents a new beginning for you, it must also follow that it will be a fresh start for your digestive system. Ayurveda does away with so many ways of eating that stress, overload and dampen your digestion, and it steadily encourages your body to regain full digestive and metabolic strength, getting the very best from all the food you eat, every time you eat.
How do you know if your digestive fire is already good? Simple: you feel wonderful. Your eyes are bright, your skin glows, your tummy is settled (rarely gassy or growly), you sleep well, you have regular bowel movements and eat regular meals without cravings in between. Your agni is balanced.
There are three other types of agni:
• Irregular – your tummy is all over the place – you’re frequently bloated, constipated and crampy, and you can suffer from gas, indigestion and hard, dry stools. Your appetite isn’t regular either: some days you’ll eat next to nothing, other days you’ll be supremely hungry and eat lots of big meals. This erratic, nervous energy is common in Vata types.
• Weak – you do not have a big, healthy appetite – instead, you are slow to hunger, but also slow to digest. You often feel heavy and lethargic after a meal and can have extended periods of constipation. Your stomach often feels “full” (a sign that your digestive system is backed up), and you often get intense cravings for very sweet food, tea and coffee. This digestive type is most common in Kapha.
• Intense – when you’re hungry, it is a hugely powerful feeling – it can come on suddenly and leave you feeling light-headed, nauseous, and desperate to find food as soon as possible. Intense thirst is common too; you often have dry lips and a dry mouth, even if you’re drinking lots of water. Your stools are often loose and you’re more prone to heartburn and stomach acid than other doshas. This is true of Pitta types.
Ayurveda aims to restore every individual to their balanced digestive state: where you wake up clear-headed, go to bed calmly, and go about your day brimming with energy.
We feel well not only because our bodies are working optimally, but also because our minds are supported by a truly nourishing and nurturing diet. We naturally feel more optimistic when we eat well. Contrast that with the lazy, heavy feeling you get after having eaten a stodgy, fatty lunch or heavy, fried breakfast. While you may feel wonderfully full at first, soon you’ll simply want to curl up and go to sleep, and the thought of having to get up or get back to work fills you with dread: “I can’t move!” That’s not natural and it’s not healthy. We should feel revitalized by food, not weighed down by it.
Perhaps you’ve experienced that “truly alive” feeling on holiday, if you’ve left the daily grind behind, and travelled somewhere where you ate only wonderfully fresh, seasonal, nutrient-dense food for a week? Did you gain a spring in your step, a glow in your skin, a sparkle in your eye? That’s the power of nourishing food, eaten in a relaxed environment, enjoyed and savoured. Food that can heal, beautify, strengthen and support us, inside and out, because we digest it well and assimilate its goodness – without stress to impede the process.
How to Balance Your Digestion and Stoke Your Fire
First up, a struggling stomach will need a spring clean. I believe this can be done with some breaking of old habits and some sensible dietary changes. I do not subscribe to colonic irrigation myself as I believe that if you eat the right foods for your body, those that also ignite your digestive fire, there’s no need to do anything more dramatic. I endorse an Ayurvedic immersion diet, which will get the body to expel its waste naturally and will also ensure that you’re not messing around with the highly complex flora of the gut. It’s an ideal place to start because it will gently ease you into a balanced state, and then help ensure that you remain there. I don’t believe in doing anything overnight – I feel that any significant change takes time, and it ought to take time because that is what makes your body and mind receptive to it. You need to do an unfamiliar thing many times before it feels natural.I was reminded of this when learning, and re-learning, how to breastfeed my children.
Despite breastfeeding being viewed as the most natural interaction there is – one assumes that the baby is born knowing how to suckle (although, sadly, this is not always true), and that the mother instinctively knows how to feed – it is, in fact, a process that often comes with pain and angst. I struggled a great deal with my first child and gave up almost every day, until, at around three months, something clicked and it became “natural”. That was after doing 8 or more daily feeds, every couple of hours, for 12 weeks. I remind myself of this whenever I hope to quell a habit of mine or adopt a new lifestyle change. All change takes time. If you are committed to moving toward a more Ayurvedic way of life, this will take time too. It’s relatively painless, but it does take time before it feels as natural as breathing.
Alongside my immersion diet, I also extol the benefits of following the ten simple steps below. They’re small changes and you can make some or all of them, in the knowledge that every little helps.
Ten Steps to a Balanced Digestive System
1. Hot Wake-up Call
Before you eat any food in the morning, drink some hot water. Drink it as is, or with a small squeeze of lime if you’re feeling bloated or constipated, or with grated ginger if you’re feeling very lethargic (i.e. if Kapha feels high).
The feeling of warm water hitting the stomach first thing in the morning is quite incredible because it’s trickling down a pipe that’s not been used in hours. Try to leave at least 20 minutes before breakfast. It’s the quickest and easiest perk-up and pick-me-up there is.
2. Try Triphala
A traditional Ayurvedic remedy (available in powder or capsule form) for gentle gut cleansing, Triphala is made from three traditional Indian fruits (haritaki, amla/amalaki and bibhitaki) and also contains psyllium, liquorice, fennel and linseed – gold-standard gut-clearers. The beauty of this supplement is that it need not be taken as part of a fast. Ideal when used in partnership with the Ayurvedic immersion, Triphala will have the body clear and humming before the week’s end.
3. Get Spice Savvy
My Turkish Cypriot background may not be Ayurvedic, but we do know a thing or two about herbs and spices, and whenever I had an upset tummy as a child, my mother would boil up a generous pinch of fennel seeds in water (the water should be left to simmer for at least five minutes, when it will infuse and turn a pretty yellow-green colour). Within minutes, my stomach started to feel better. The drink is lovely and mild with an herbal aniseed-like flavour – not sharp or bitter as you might expect – and I now make it for my children whenever they have what they call a “bubbly tummy”. Fennel is a truly great gut-calmer, as is ginger – both of which can be added to all foods or boiled up in hot drinks, and are widely used in Ayurveda.
Another Turkish tea I make for relatives (we call it kokulu çay – “fragrant tea”) includes eight to ten cloves, one large broken-up piece of cinnamon bark and a large pinch of fennel seeds. Place these ingredients in a strainer and run boiling water over them to rinse away any sediment or dust, then use the spices in the strainer to make your tea, just as you’d use tea leaves. Or better yet, boil them up in a pan of water, strain and drink. Other spices that are great to add to your diet when you’re feeling off-colour are ginger, ground coriander, turmeric, cumin and black pepper – all of which are Ayurveda’s secret weapons for stoking and restoring ailing digestive fire.
4. It’s Fruit O’Clock
I love fruit, particularly in the summer when I crave it strongly. For years, I used to eat a bowl of fruit after dinner and had actually reached the point where I thought I had irritable bowel syndrome because I would always experience significant discomfort after large meals. Now I realize that there is a time and a way to eat fruit, and it isn’t alongside or after any other food. Fruit is easily digested – it contains some fibre, but is primarily fructose and breaks down quickly in the stomach. So, if you eat it after a meal and it lands on top of some complex carbohydrates or protein, you will end up with food that’s being broken down by different enzymes, at different rates. The result? A lot of messy gut activity and gas, as a by-product. My gut pains were simply down to having eaten fruit at the wrong time.
Ayurveda is specific about fruit and suggests it always be eaten on an empty stomach. So after your glass of warm water in the morning – and particularly in summer – enjoy ripe fruit at room temperature. This is how we were meant to eat it – sun-warmed, first thing, fresh from the tree.
When fruit is refrigerator-cold it shocks the stomach, which hinders optimal digestion. Almost all fruits taste better and sweeter at room temperature – particularly berries, peaches, apricots and melon. Get into the habit of taking fruit out of the refrigerator the night before and eating it about 40 minutes before breakfast. For more on what to eat, and with what, see chapter 5.
5. Take Your Time
Some doshas really do need to take more time than others over their meals: Kapha types, with their sluggish digestion, benefit from spending a longer time chewing; Pitta, with their tendency for internal fire, do well to eat quietly in a peaceful spot; and Vata types, who often suffer digestive upset and loose bowels, need to slow down the eating process completely, savour each mouthful and never eat on the go (which is a common tendency with airy, and busy, Vata types).
6. Be a Probiotic Pro
Achieving optimal gut health (and digestive fire) is at the heart of Ayurveda. One of the simplest ways to aid digestive fire is to boost your stomach’s healthy bacteria with a proven probiotic blend, particularly after a course of antibiotics or during illness. I am calling on modern wisdom here. Obviously, ancient Ayurveda doesn’t have a stance on probiotics, but then, the food we were eating 5,000 years ago would have been long before agriculture and would have been as wild, fresh and organic as it’s possible to be. In today’s modern world, and through my own trial and error, I have learned that my digestive fire, or agni, is always strongest when I support it with probiotics and enzymes (see Step 7 below). We often hear that our immune system is situated in our gut: what this means is that 70 per cent of the antibacterial and antiviral cells within our body are situated in the walls of the stomach and intestines. Our stomach also produces acid, which kills off most pathogens, and our small intestine produces mucus, which blocks further potential pathogens from entering our bloodstreams. So, when your gut lining is weakened, your immunity will also be compromised. I really cannot overstate the importance of a healthy stomach in the pursuit of good overall health. For this reason, I recommend taking a proven daily probiotic (see Further Reading and Resources, page 203–206).
7. Eat Your Enzymes
Some doshas struggle with protein or carbohydrate digestion more than others, but all can benefit from a good comprehensive digestive enzyme. If we ate only natural nutrient-rich food, our digestive enzymes would do a fine job of extracting the nutrients we needed from them, thereby sufficiently fuelling our bodies. And if we were to eat solely raw fruit and raw vegetables, the enzymes we need to digest those are already contained in the raw foods themselves. However, these enzymes can be depleted if the soil the food is grown in is low in nutrients (and this is increasingly the case for environmental, climatic and economic reasons). For these reasons, I feel it is wise for some people to invest in a good digestive enzyme – particularly if you have low agni and are often prone to indigestion.
Interestingly, we also produce fewer gut enzymes as we get older – making around half as many at 50 years old as we do at 20 – so it’s a sensible support mechanism as we age. Look for a good combined enzyme (which will help with all food digestion, including fats, protein and carbohydrates) in capsule form. (see Further Reading and Resources, pages 203–206)
8. Guard Against Gas
Once you’re eating according to some of the guidelines above, you should start to feel a lot better. But if a rogue meal hits your stomach hard and leaves you unsettled, I’ve found three things that help nicely:
1. The fennel tea I described earlier, sipped slowly
2. A fresh mint tea
3. A chew of a pinch of fennel seeds
9. To Snack, or Not to Snack?
First things first: you need to get better acquainted with your body. A lot of people leap toward the vending machine at the first sign of hunger, but it could simply be thirst, boredom or habit. Get used to the light feeling in your body when you’ve fully digested your previous meal, and don’t automatically equate that lightness with a need to fill it. When you are hungry between meals, try to get away from eating insubstantial snacks all day long, which never satisfy, are never fully digested, and mean that you never stop thinking about food. If you’re eating properly, you shouldn’t need to snack very often. If you start to feel hungry sooner than expected, drink a cup of herbal tea or warm water first. Sometimes it’s thirst you’re feeling. A good, nutritious, wholesome meal will keep you satisfied for a long time, and with lunch as your main meal of the day, you should not find that you are hungry again before dinner. But if you are, the best choices you can make are warm and cooked (and therefore easily digested) snacks, such as a cup of masala chai made with milk or a plant-based alternative, or a small bowl of hearty, satiating soup. We share lots of lovely recipes at thisconsciouslife.co.
10. And Breathe . . .
I’ve talked about how vital it is to eat slowly and mindfully rather than as a means of filling up as quickly as possible before going about your day again. I know how tough it can be to find time to eat in a busy job (as an office “junior”, I was once told I could eat when my editor ate – which was never). I suppose it’s a balancing act: if you do work in a place that supports your right to sit on a park bench and savour your sandwich, or in a quiet canteen savouring your soup, then please take advantage of it. If you don’t, then try to ensure that, whenever mealtimes are your own – breakfast or dinner, perhaps – you savour them, you chew well, eat slowly, and stop your mind from racing on to the inevitable, “once I’ve eaten this, I can get up and do X, Y and Z.” Eating is the means by which we fill ourselves with life – a sacred, enjoyable, delicious experience, to which we owe both time and respect.