The Principles of Ayurvedic Eating
Ayurvedic cookery is more than just what you whip up in the kitchen—it’s a whole way of life. The recipe section of this book will guide you into an Ayurvedic diet and lifestyle. The recipes themselves are suggestions to get you started, but what this book really aims to do is to teach you how to integrate Ayurvedic principles into both your cooking and your daily life. The concept includes preparing fresh food for yourself, eating in a seasonal rhythm, and enjoying consistent mealtimes. What follows are pointers to help you attend to aspects of your diet that aren’t as much about the foods themselves as they are about the overall role food is playing in your life.
Ayurvedic eating takes into account intention and attitude, time of day, whether something is a meal versus a snack, portion size, the season, and the dining space. In this chapter you will find a practice tip for each of these aspects so that you can start experimenting with new ideas about food. To ensure success, begin with the one or two that speak to you, rather than trying to engage all the tips at once. Easing into change keeps the body/mind stable, while trying to accomplish too much too fast can result in a burnout.
If Habit Is Driving, Stop the Car
The work of forging new habits takes discipline in the beginning, but once in motion, it gets easier, and eventually the new practices become second nature. In fact, the hardest part might be recognizing your old patterns and changing how you do things. Imagine that you are driving in the mud over the same route again and again, so the tire tracks begin to get deep and it becomes difficult to get out. The first steps to creating fresh tracks are to stop the car, back it up, and start again in a new direction. In the moment a craving or habit pattern comes up, pause, take a breath, and ask yourself what action will help you feel better in the long run. With a little awareness, you will become awake enough to stop the car before you go down the same old path. Now on the fresh track, the driving gets easier, and you are more likely to arrive where you intend to go.
The practice tips below offer actions for change, because old habits need new ones to take their place. Again, you don’t have to act on them all; just start by paying attention to the following aspects of your food world.
Booby Trap Alert! When you’re forging new habits, you might experience a lag time between noticing the old, nonbeneficial habit and changing the accustomed action to one that’s better for you. This can be tough on your heart. Take a breath and be kind to yourself. Remember, humans have been working on living well for thousands of years. Giving yourself a hard time can set you up to feel unsatisfied, incompetent, and then defeated. Celebrate your growing awareness with the affirmation that you are in a process. Know that simply noticing the old patterns is the first step toward change—and it can be the hardest step. Before making your move, give yourself a preemptive pat on the back.
The Why, How, How Much, When, and Where of Eating
WHY AND HOW WE EAT
In Ayurveda, why we eat is the most important factor in our relationship to food, as it determines how the food will be received by the body. When you begin to use food as medicine, hold the intention for the food to be nourishing, energizing, enjoyable, and easy on your body. Keep in mind, there is room for both enjoyment and nourishment. Ayurveda references the hunger of the tongue as well as the hunger of the stomach. Pleasing the palate is an important aspect of Ayurvedic cookery, one that is accomplished through the use of digestive spices and the inclusion of the six tastes (see page 18). Eating foods that one dislikes is not considered beneficial. So, although the focus is on nourishment first, remember that the foods you eat should also be pleasing to you.
How we eat is certainly more important than what we eat. For instance, you could have a carefully chosen, lovingly prepared meal in front of you, but if you eat it while worrying that it will cause you to gain weight, the worry can create nervous indigestion or cause your body to reject the food.
The key to eating with the right mind-set is to approach your meals with gratitude. Just as you would take care to listen to a friend in need, take care to notice your foods. As soon as your body smells food, it begins to prepare the appropriate enzymes for the fare it recognizes. Before you’ve even taken a bite into your mouth, the process of digestion has begun! Engage the senses by looking closely, smelling, and feeling the qualities of the food on your plate. What colors, scents, and textures do you observe?
PRACTICE TIP: Make a practice of taking a few moments to sit with the food before you eat it—just a few breaths to take it all in with your senses and to prepare for eating.
HOW MUCH?
Imagine that your stomach is divided into four parts. The ancient texts of Ayurveda suggest that “two parts of the stomach should be filled with solid foods, one part by liquids, and the remaining one part should be kept vacant for accommodating air.”1 The amount of solid food you can hold in your cupped hands is a good measure to go by.
Drinking liquid is an important part of each meal. The ideal drink would be warm water, plain or with fresh-squeezed lemon, or a digestive tea, which you will find recipes for in the seasonal sections of this book. A small cup of six ounces or so will suffice. Drinking a lot of water less than thirty minutes before a meal or within two hours afterward will dilute the digestive juices. The right amount of liquid will make a nice ahara rasa, juice of the food.
PRACTICE TIP: Eat slowly, making it a point to put the silverware down after every few bites and sit back. This can take some willpower. The payoff is that as your practice of attentive eating grows, you will simply stop eating when you begin to feel full. The indicator of fullness is the first belch. This signifies the stomach is letting out some air to make space for the food—so if you add more food in there, your stomach will run out of room. Eat slowly enough to notice the belch, and you will find it’s your body’s built-in system for portion control!
WHEN WE EAT
Eating at the proper time of day determines whether the food will be well digested or not. Believe it or not, a burger at noon is preferable to a salad at midnight. In Ayurveda what we are working toward is to eat food at mealtimes and nothing in between. The general recommendation is three meals a day, but for some people, two meals a day may be enough; others may need four. This will depend on your amount of physical activity, your particular metabolism, and, of course, the season—in the winter, for example, you are likely to be hungrier than in the summer and eat more to keep your body warm.
Remember that the digestive fire is like a campfire. If you wait too long to add wood to it, the fire will die out. If you continuously add wood to it, you will smother the flames, and you will need to stop adding and wait until it grows again before putting more wood on. Most of us are in the habit of eating too often. The fire never gets to come to full strength because it always has something new to digest. The practice of not eating between meals allows the fire to grow.
PRACTICE TIP: Take a few weeks to experiment with how much breakfast you need to get you through to lunch without snacking. This will require you to have a general routine for what time you eat your meals. It is easier to make it through the morning than it is to make it through the afternoon without snacking.
Once you feel comfortable with your breakfast and lunch routine, you can start observing how much food you need to eat at lunchtime to keep you from getting too hungry or spacey before dinner. At the very least, you will begin noticing if you have a tendency to skimp at lunchtime and end up eating a few other things (like sweets and coffee) through the afternoon. A full lunch will keep you satisfied and out of trouble.
It took me about six months to feel comfortable eating only at mealtimes. One day I was so hungry after breakfast and the next I was stuffed! I hadn’t been in the habit of eating meals—I was a grazer, and it all felt new to me. After a year, I felt like eating only at mealtimes and I experienced fewer symptoms of poor digestion by allowing each meal to completely digest. Even so, some days I say forget it, and I have a snack! I take pleasure in indulging in a break from the routine from time to time.
NOTE: The metabolism needs time to get used to a shift in eating patterns. Take care not to be too rigid about it and give yourself plenty of time to transition to eating square meals at routine times of day. If you make it happen even half of the time, you are doing your digestion a favor.
TRUE HUNGER
Suggested Daily Rhythm
The heat of the digestive fire mirrors the heat of the sun as it warms up and cools down over the course of the day. The following meal schedules optimize digestion, supported by this natural flow.
Breakfast. Before noon, the fire has not yet reached its peak. Try a light breakfast to ease you into the day, though if you are awake early or exercise before breakfast, you may find the morning meal needs to be more substantial. Eat enough to get you through to lunch.
Big Lunch. As the sun reaches its peak after noon, lunch is the ideal time to eat the largest amount of food and/or the most complex foods, such as fats and proteins. It is also the time for eating one of those treats someone brought into the office today, rather than snacking on it between meals.
Supper. The word supper is similar to the word supplement. This light evening meal is meant to supplement your food intake if you didn’t get enough food earlier in the day. If you are in the habit, as many are, of having a family or social meal at night, do yourself a favor by being sure to eat a good lunch. You will be less tempted to overeat in the evening, the time when the digestive system is winding down for the day. Remember that family and social meals can be more about the precious time you spend with your loved ones than about the food. Shift your focus to being nourished by the company you are with, and you will feel satisfied by a lighter meal.
Eating dinner two to three hours before bedtime ensures that you fall asleep without food still in your stomach. This will allow your organs to perform some cleanup while you rest, rather than having to work through that late dinner you ate. As in all things Ayurveda, it’s what you do habitually that counts. It’s fine to have late meals sometimes, but as a general habit, eat lightly and early.
Another daily rhythm, one that works well in hot weather, is to take two meals a day: a bigger meal in the late morning, before the temperature gets too warm, and a more modest one as the day cools down, before the sun sets. In hot countries, people characteristically take a siesta in the afternoon and eat a late supper, after dark, when it is cool. In the American latitudes, summer sunset may be as late as 9 P.M., so take the second meal around 5:00 or 6:00 if you plan to get to bed early.
YOU DESERVE A LUNCH BREAK
WHAT WE EAT
What we eat is the aspect of diet everyone talks about, yet it is only a part of the whole picture in Ayurveda. The foods to eat are ones that balance the qualities of the season or the qualities you are experiencing at the time. The seasonal diet in this book ensures that you will get to enjoy all the tastes but at the appropriate times of year. The beauty of nature is that it provides us with foods that are beneficial for the season, like yams with their building qualities in winter and cilantro with its cooling qualities in summer.
PRACTICE TIP: During each season, focus on the qualities presented in the beginning of that section in the book. Over the course of the year, you will have plenty of time to experience all twenty qualities as they emerge.
WHERE WE EAT
The place where one takes meals is most beneficial if it is quiet and peaceful, without too much sensory stimulation, such as loud music, talking, TV, computers, or strong artificial fragrances such as air freshener or perfume.
Sit down when you eat. Eating at your desk or on the run means you are eating while focusing on other activities. This habit will steal the energy from your digestive organs, leaving meals not fully digested or nutrients not fully absorbed, and it’s unacceptable. Consider drawing a hard line with your schedule: set aside twenty to thirty minutes solely for eating your meal, and do not habitually use the mealtime to accomplish other tasks.
TAKING IT TO WORK
PRACTICE TIP: Begin to look for quiet places in your work sphere that support your meal breaks. At home, beautify the dining space with plants or flowers on the table and pleasing linens. And keep the media devices in a different room, including the phone.
Traditional Tips for Improving Digestion
Following a few rules of thumb can make a huge difference in helping you maintain a healthy digestive fire, strong metabolism, and regular elimination. Some of these recommendations may seem simple, but the effects can be profound. Pay attention as you read the list below and see if one or two items jump out at you. Start by working on just those habits.
• Do not take iced drinks, especially with meals. Ask for hot or room-temperature tap or still bottled water at restaurants.
• Drink warm water throughout the day, and in cool weather carry a thermos instead of a water bottle.
• Favor warm, cooked foods over raw.
• Reduce the amount of leftovers you eat and get into the habit of cooking fresh meals more often.
• Wait two hours after meals before drinking.
• Space out your meals by at least three to four hours to allow for complete digestion before eating again. You may have to make this change gradually to allow your blood sugar to adjust. Avoid grazing—your digestive fire can never build up with constant input.
• Do not eat when you aren’t hungry. It is OK to skip a meal if you’re not hungry, and in fact it can be harmful to habitually eat when not hungry, even if the mind tells you it’s time. Remember that sometimes you have to slow down to notice if you are truly in need of food.
• Take your time to eat and rest a little for ten minutes afterward, but do not sleep directly after eating.
• Take a light walk after you eat.
• If you are going to have a treat, enjoy it with lunch, when the digestion is strongest, and do not eat again until dinner.
Kindling Digestive Fire and Improving Assimilation: Deepana and Pachana
Special culinary spices are prized for their power to kick-start the appetite (deepana) and to improve the digestion of food and breakdown of ama (pachana). While the best way to reduce ama is to follow the aforementioned guidelines, any Ayurvedic diet will also make moderate use of digestive spices to support a clean burning system. The great news is these are all things you are likely to have in your kitchen already, like ginger, lemon, and black pepper.
You will find deepana and pachana substances most helpful when you are experiencing:
• a weak appetite
• a heavy feeling in the stomach
• a heavy feeling upon waking up
• a sleepy feeling after eating
• taking more than two hours to digest a meal
• trouble digesting a full meal
DEEPANA: Before a meal, try one of these two options to stimulate a sluggish appetite.
SPICY BEVERAGE
Into a full cup of warm water, add the fresh-squeezed juice of ¼–½ lemon and a hearty dash of black pepper. Drink this 20–30 minutes before a meal. You will get hungry!
GINGER BLASTER
Cut and peel a slice of gingerroot about ¼ inch thick and squeeze 1 tsp or so of lemon juice on it. Add a dash of salt. Chew 20–30 minutes before a meal.
PACHANA: After a meal, to alleviate bloating, gas, heavy stomach, and lethargy, try one of the following:
Make a strong cup of ginger tea, relax, and sip slowly.
Enjoy a digestive tea (see seasonal chapters for recommended recipes).
Get specific for your ailment: make one of the following teas by boiling 1 tsp of the spice or herb, whole or freshly ground, in 1 cup of water for 10–15 minutes.
• For acid stomach, fennel or mint tea.
• For bloating, ginger and turmeric tea.
• For a congested feeling, ginger and cumin tea.
• For sugar cravings, cinnamon tea.
NOTE: Do not use concentrated lemon juice; it does not have the same digestive qualities as fresh lemon.
The Flow of Food: Establishing a Rhythm
All the processes in your body that move do so in rhythm. The beat of your heart, the daily sleep cycle, the monthly hormonal cycles are all following a pattern. These rhythms are inherent. However, sometimes your external life becomes arrhythmic, meaning there is no pattern to your days. You might often go to sleep at 3 A.M. and at 9 P.M. a lot of the time, too, and sleep in until all different hours. You may not be able to say when you eat lunch most days; maybe you don’t even get around to it sometimes and you don’t notice.
The digestive system is like a pet dog. The dog gets in the habit of you coming in the door at 6 P.M. and feeding him. If you come home late or forget to feed him, he is going to get confused, hungry, and scared. The same thing happens when humans override the natural appetite and fail to eat meals on time. Inconsistencies in the timing of meals will create inconsistency of digestion and elimination, production of blood sugar, and mood swings.
Unlike the pet dog, in humans the mix-up happens gradually and is easy to ignore. But, like the dog, the digestion can be trained. If you make a point to be rhythmic about when you eat your meals, your bodily processes will run smoothly. The appetite and the acids and enzymes in the gut will get in the habit of building at the appropriate times of day, resulting in increased assimilation and absorption of nutrition. You will get more out of your food, need to eat less, and crave fewer nonbeneficial foods. You will feel better because rhythm is something the nerves can count on, and consistent mealtimes really help lower stress levels and diminish mood swings.
You just learned the suggested daily rhythm for meals, based on the rhythms nature dictates. This is an ideal to aim for, but not everyone is in a position to follow the ideal flow. Here are some more options to help you establish a healthy groove.
GIMME A BREAK
The word project implies that finding a rhythm in your meal schedule is going to take some work. On Day 1, the change can be daunting. I have broken down the process into the following steps, based on what has worked for me and for my clients. Commit to the project for a few weeks, long enough to notice an improvement in how you feel. Feeling good will inspire you to keep going. As always, take it one step at a time, because Ayurveda teaches that small changes are lasting ones.
Start by carving out one consistent pattern in your eating schedule by finding a window for your morning meal, midday meal, or evening meal. (If you can, make it midday.) Practice eating a meal during that window most days for a week or two.
The next goal is to make this meal be one you prepare. This requires that you create a window of time for cooking. Begin with every other day. Most of the recipes in this book will make two meals, so you can pack one portion up to eat on the off day. In time, you may go for the ideal of freshly preparing food every day. Foods kept overnight lose a lot of their prana. However, favoring your own cooking over eating out is worth a lot, and relying on leftovers half the time is a great place to start. What Ayurveda doesn’t recommend is cooking one pot of food on Sunday and eating it all week long. Once you feel the difference from eating your freshly prepared foods, leftovers will begin to lose their appeal.
KITCHEN HINT: A good time for simmering something is in the morning, while you are getting ready for work and performing your morning routine. You could soak a grain overnight, cook it in a jiffy in the morning, and use half for Creamed Grain Cereal and bring the rest to work to have with soup (instead of bread) or with a Steamed Salad Bowl later.
Let’s look at a breakfast example. You probably always get up at a similar time of day and get ready for work. Give yourself half an hour to prepare and sit down to eat one of the template breakfast recipes. Your breakfast is no longer a variable. If you notice that you’re sleeping in and compromising your breakfast time, you will know your life is getting out of balance. You are too busy to take care of yourself.
In the appendixes (see page 286), I have provided kitchen techniques for convenience, such as cutting down cooking time by soaking grains and legumes overnight or prechopping some veggies on a day off. This and the simplicity of the recipes, as a rule, are meant to support you in making a positive change.
If you make a pattern of getting up thirty minutes earlier than you’re accustomed to, your body will respond by getting sleepy earlier. And if you listen to your body, you will move toward an earlier bedtime naturally and consequently enjoy enough rest. Well-digested meals will increase your energy, and you might find you don’t need as much sleep as you thought.
Food Combinations
Certain combinations of foods are incompatible, meaning they are likely to ferment in the gut, resulting in gas and bloating, or be too heavy to digest fully, resulting in the creation of ama, the thick, sticky by-product of incomplete digestion. It is considered the substance that begins to cause disease. Think of ama as undigested food that keeps hanging around until it turns into something the body can’t easily expel. The following pointers on food combining are good to follow, especially if you aren’t feeling well, but remember that an overzealous approach can create stress. One is likely to eat incompatible combinations sometimes, and unless you notice they make you feel bad or you have chronic digestive disorders, relax. If you are making harmonious combinations in your own cooking, your system will be able to process some crazy combinations from time to time. However, if you often feel gassy or bloated after eating, observing correct food combining could turn that around.
MIXING FRUITS WITH OTHER FOODS
Fruit breaks down in the stomach at a faster rate than other foods. When you have fruit and other foods together at the same meal, the stomach will hold the fruit even after it is digested, while it’s still breaking down all of the other food. The digested fruit will begin to ferment slightly. Postdigestion, this fermentation will give a sour quality (hot and sharp) to the meal.
Fruits cooked with other foods, however, such as the apples and raisins in Kate’s Apple Crisp (see page 217), are less incompatible than raw fruits. Ayurveda teaches that cooking foods together in the pot increases their compatibility by introducing them to each other before they join in the stomach. Recipes never suggest garnishing or making a dessert with uncooked fruits. Eating raw fruit for dessert is not a great habit.
PRACTICE TIP: If you have a long time between lunch and dinner, eating a piece of seasonal fruit one hour before the meal will tide you over, and your system will have digested it fully before you eat the next food.
THE DREADED SMOOTHIE: A FOOD-COMBINING NIGHTMARE
The king of incompatible meals is the ice-cold, banana- and milk-based blender bomb known as the smoothie. It seems like a foolproof concept to throw all your nutrition in the carafe with some frozen berries and call it a meal, but on the whole, smoothies are too cold and too complicated for the gut to handle well. This book includes a few warm, fruit-free smoothie recipes for you to check out (see Spiced Nut Milk Smoothie, page 223, and Winter Rejuvenating Tonic, page 265).
If you are an avid smoothie maker, give your gut a break by observing the following guidelines:
• Drink your smoothie at room temperature. Do not make it with ice. If needed, add a few tablespoons of warm water.
• Take cool, fruity smoothies in warm weather only. Favor fresh seasonal fruits over frozen.
• Keep the smoothie to three ingredients.
• Do not mix milk and bananas. Both are mucus forming, and together they create too much mucus for the stomach to burn through.
• Add the warming quality of Everyday Sweet Spice Mix (see page 112) to balance a smoothie’s cool quality, which can douse digestive fires.
Keep Meals Simple
As a general guideline, keep a meal focused on a major player, like grain or protein, rather than branching out in all directions. Eat enough of the main fare to keep you from grazing afterward. The fewer items you eat in one sitting, the more harmonious your digestion will be. Many of the recipes will suggest a partner dish to help you feel satisfied without your menu getting complicated.
TRY ONE-POT MEALS
Make the one-pot meal a staple of your weekly eating routine. It’s easy to make, it travels well, it’s filling, and the foods will make a harmonious tune as they cook together. Cooked separately or served raw, these combinations are more difficult to digest. Ayurvedic cookery features a lot of stews, which include spiced combinations of vegetables, lentils and beans, grains and other starches, nuts, and sometimes fruits. I would not recommend eating these foods together in a salad, but cooked together in one pot, it is quite a different story. Remember, it is best not to eat the same meal for several days, so make the right amount of stew for a meal or two, and get in the habit of cooking every day, or at least every other day. The recipes are meant to be quick and simple.
FOODS YOU WILL NOT FIND IN THIS BOOK AND WHY
