Chapter 11
Selecting the Right Diet for Your Type
In This Chapter
Introducing the effects of food on your mind
Coping with food combinations
Learning ways to improve your digestion
Sorting out the most suitable diet for physical type
Implementing the rules for dining
When you’re young, you have about 10,000 taste buds, but this reduces to around 2,000 by the time you reach 80 years old. Guard what you have with the best quality food.
Corruption of the sense of taste can lead people to poor food choices that not only disrupt the sense of taste but also harm the taste buds.
Taste isn’t the whole picture of diet, of course, and within this chapter I tell you about the effects of food – and combinations of foods – on your body and your moods. I talk about general nutrition and about dietary aids to nutrition and for the different doshas. You don’t have to know your constitution for this chapter, but you get more out of it if you do. (Read Chapter 4 to determine your constitution.)
The Effect of Flavour on Your Emotions
Ayurveda states that all foods have emotional analogues. That means if you’re feeling unloved, for example, you tend to favour sweet tastes to pacify your emotion. Table 11-1 shows you how each of the flavours connects with different traits and emotions.
Table 11-1 Emotional Analogues Of The Six Flavours
|
Taste |
Positive |
Negative |
|
Sweet |
Love, compassion, care, wholesomeness, grounding |
Attachment, greed, temptation, laziness |
|
Sour |
Alertness, attentiveness, realism, focus, discrimination |
Judgemental, critical, rejecting, drawing wrong conclusions |
|
Salty |
Energy, enthusiasm, stimulation, ability to digest ideas, faith |
Attachment, anger, grief, temptation |
|
Bitter |
Renunciation, austerity, celibacy, happy with solitude, clarity |
Isolation, loneliness, separation from others |
|
Pungent |
Increases the ability to digest ideas and makes the mind more probing, motivation |
Anger, envy, hatred, jealousy |
|
Astringent |
Stability, groundedness spirituality, surety, asceticism |
Fear, insecurity, anxiety, withdrawal |
To strictly follow an Ayurvedic diet, you’d eat food in a prescribed order: sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and then astringent. (I tell you more about flavour in Chapter 10.) So, for example, you’d start a meal with rice and move on to sour pickle, ginger with rock salt, and so on. I admit that I, and most Ayurvedic practitioners I know, don’t follow this practice, but now you know the theory!
Food and the Three States of Energy
If you eat roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, you feel more sluggish than if you consume a fresh green salad with olive oil drizzled over it. You’ve probably found this to be true in your own experience (and with various different foods and combinations). The effect of combinations of food has to do with the three states of energy, known as gunas. (I discuss these in detail in Chapter 2.)
The three states of energy, the gunas, are:
Sattwa: Potential energy, linked to light nourishing foods
Rajas: Kinetic energy from energising foods
Tamas: Inertia, caused by heavy and hard-to-digest foods
Referred to as God itself in the ancient text Taittiriya Upanishad, food is much more than simple nutrition. According to Ayurveda, when you eat, you assimilate the essence of creation within your body and turn it into the building blocks of bodily tissues.
Food also affects your mind and your emotional states. Ayurveda divides foods into three categories according to their effects:
Sattwic foods are sweet and cooling by nature and have a calming effect on your mind. This group includes:
• Dairy products
• Fruits
• Honey
• Nuts
• Wheat
Rajasic foods confer stimulation to your mind and rouse your passions. They include highly spiced and salty foods, which are hard to stop eating after you taste them.
Alcohol is included in this group, and you’ve probably felt the terrific lift when you drink it, but you’ve probably also felt the sleepiness when the kick is over.
Garlic, fried foods and caffeinated drinks also give you a buzz, but if you consume them too often, they can become quite addictive.
Tamasic foods increase laziness, pessimism and dullness of mind. Avoid these foods at all costs when you’re ill, and don’t make them the mainstay of your diet when you aren’t. They include:
• Canned foods
• Processed foods
• Heavy meat such as red meat and manufactured meat products
• Powdered milk
Sadly, much of the fast food available today falls into the tamasic category. This food is simply a filler, with no nutrients. When you eat food like this, you tend to eat more because your body is searching for nutrients.
Many people are surprised to learn that an Ayurvedic diet is not vegetarian. In fact, the qualities of many types of meat are spoken about in the Charaka Samita (an important Ayurvedic text), from quail to elephant. Traditionally, when meat was consumed it was eaten in small quantities and as a sacrament.
Table 11-2 is a list of foods and how they affect your mood by creating sattwa, rajas and tamas if you focus too much on one guna. The way to go with this list is to always include foods from the sattwic section in your meals, and include a few from the other groups in measured quantities.
Eating to Enhance Your Digestion
Naturally, what you eat has a lot to do with how well your digestive system functions. Take in a lot of heavy or processed foods and you tax your system. Or dine on fresh whole foods and feel the increased energy you get from not asking your system to work overtime.
Truly enhancing your digestion and keeping your system free from toxins depends on an array of factors, however. Within the following guidelines, you probably recognise a lot of the rules as advice your granny gave you:
Food that’s been cooked and that you eat when it’s warm is much easier to digest than raw food.
Perfectly ripe food (neither unripe or overripe) is the friendliest to your system.
Avoid eating heavy food at night; eat at least three hours before bed.
A short walk after a meal helps you to digest it.
Don’t drink iced water with food; it reduces your gut motility, which in turn impedes the action of your agni (fire) in the stomach and creates indigestion.
The stomach needs to be a third full of food, a third with fluid, and a third empty to allow your digestion to work correctly.
After eating, don’t do heavy mental or physical work as it can impede the process of digestion.
To help the flow of digestive juices, try chewing a slice of ginger with a squirt of lemon and a pinch of salt on it about ten minutes before you eat your main meal.
Leftovers can have less vital force, or virya. Eat freshly prepared food whenever you can.
When you’re under a great deal of stress, adrenalin surges around your system and your gut pretty much shuts down. Be extra vigilant during these times.
One-pot cooked foods like casseroles, in which all the favours blend together, are easy for you to digest at these times.
Avoid drinking water at least 15 minutes before eating, so that you don’t dilute the precious digestive juices. Sipping water with the food is fine, but keep it to a minimum.
Eat at fixed times. Your body loves routine.
Whenever possible, eat your main meal at midday. Your digestion aligns with the sun and so is strongest at this time.
According to the Ksema-kuntuhala, a Vedic cookbook from the 2nd century AD, eating in pleasant surroundings with good company is as important as the food itself.
Don’t eat when you’re upset or angry. Your body can’t process food correctly during these times.
Include a selection of all six tastes to feel most satisfied.
Keep your kitchen and utensils as clean as possible, and wash your hands before and after eating your food.
Consume foods that are appropriate to the season and climate. A leafy salad won’t build a strong immune system in the middle of winter.
Identifying Incompatible Food Combinations
Foods don’t just react with your body chemistry but with each other, along with the elements of place, time, process, and so on. Certain food combinations deposit toxins or ama in the tissues if you eat them habitually. Avoiding detrimental mixtures helps you stay in tip-top condition.
The ancient texts identify many combinations to avoid, and suggest that you consider:
Place (desam): Avoid food that emulates the area, like rice and crackers in arid lands or wet and sweet foods in marshy spots.
Time (kalam): Don’t eat cold and dry foods in a cold season, or really hot foods in summer. So no ice cream or salad in winter!
Fire (agni): Steer clear of heavy foods if you have low digestive capacity. Your ability to digest food and convert it into tissue is innate. Certain individuals with a very light frame don’t cope well with heavy foods.
Dose (matra): Certain doses, or quantities of mixtures, of foods should be avoided. For example don’t mix honey and ghee in equal quantity. Post-digestively, honey is heating and ghee is cooling, so they work in opposition to each other.
Process (samskara): The way food is produced affects it. For example, pressed rice is heavy and puffed rice is light. If you’re on a weight-loss diet, rice crackers are far less likely to put weight on your midriff than pressed sticky rice in sushi.
Potency (virya): Avoid the following combinations of foods, which have incompatible potencies. (You can find out about these effects in Chapter 10.)
• Milk has a cold potency and fish has a warm potency, therefore the common English dish of fish with parsley sauce isn’t such a good idea because the sauce contains milk.
• Meat with honey, milk, germinated grains, radish or molasses.
• Meat of domestic animals with game.
• Milk with sour substances such as cherries or with yeast-containing products, meat, melons or bananas.
• Milk with oxalic-acid-rich vegetables like spinach, radish, melons, tomatoes or potatoes.
• Fruits with potatoes.
• Dates with yogurt or corn.
• Heated honey or cooked honey, which creates an insoluble mass that blocks the srotas. (I describe the srotas, or passageways, in Chapter 2.)
• Eggs with milk, lemon, fish, bananas or cheese.
• Mangoes with cucumber or cheese.
• Fruit with meals.
• Lemon with tomatoes, milk, cheese, yogurt or cucumbers.
• Corn with raisins, dates or bananas.
Alimentary canal (kostha): Make sure you don’t eat too small a quantity of food, which leads to undernourishment. By the same token, don’t eat too much; it may make you overweight and subject to a myriad of complaints.
Condition (avastha): Avoid foods that increase a dosha; for example, you don’t want a vata-increasing food when you have excessive fatigue in your body and you have a vata constitution.
Order (krama): Avoid eating when you have an urge to use the toilet.
Must (parichara): Don’t drink hot water after eating a lot of pork. Pork is very heating to your system and along with hot water can create too much heat.
Obey (upachara): Refrain from consuming cold items after eating ghee. Ultimately, both substances are cooling and so will create ama in your system.
Cooking (paka): Avoid eating partially cooked, overcooked or even burned food, which is more likely to form ama and can clog up your system.
Combinations (samyoga): The previous list for potency shows you food combinations to avoid.
Heart (hrd): Steer clear of tasteless processed food and unpleasant food.
Quality (sampat): Don’t use substances of poor quality, such as old or spoiled food.
Rules (vidhi): These rules apply to cooking and eating:
• Eat in a quiet place, if possible. Eating mindfully, by really concentrating on your food, is important so that you chew properly and encourage proper digestion. You’re also less likely to eat too much.
• Keep your kitchen fresh and clean. Traditionally in India, the kitchen was only used for cooking and was separated from the main dwelling. Outdoor clothing and shoes weren’t worn in the kitchen.
• Don’t eat too much dry food. Moist food is considered easier to digest.
• Use well-seasoned carbon steel, cast iron, earthenware, ceramic and glass cooking utensils. Avoid aluminium and Teflon cooking pots.
Matching Diet to Dosha
Given the intricate interplay between your mind and body and the foods you eat, it’s easy to see that your basic constitution plays into which foods are most appropriate for you. What buoys a kapha constitution may be detrimental to someone who is pitta dominant. The upcoming sections show you how to match diet to constitution.
Eating for kapha
Kapha dosha is smooth like custard, soft like marshmallow, cold like ice-cream, stable like bread, moist like melon, heavy like banana and stickylike treacle.
If you have a kapha constitution:
Focus on light, dry and warm food.
Seek pungent, bitter and astringent tastes.
Avoid cold, heavy foods and drinks.
Pass on rich desserts. (Sorry.)
Skip really salty foods to keep weight from piling on (although a little is okay and even encourages salivation and enjoyment).
Make your food spicier to increase digestive power. Add black pepper or ginger. Wasabi paste and mustard also give pep to your diet.
Leave oily fried foods out of your diet. You can’t digest them easily, and they end up around your waist and not burned off with activity.
Kaphas already have strong, well-built bodies and therefore need less of the body-building foods like bread, pasta and rich desserts, which should make up a smaller proportion of their daily menu.
Stick to low-fat food choices when you have the opportunity. Oils that are appropriate for you because they are slightly heating are sunflower and corn oil. Ghee in moderate quantities is useful to you because it increases your precious digestive fire.
All foods become easier to digest if you roast or toast them, because they become lighter and drier. So if you want to eat bread, for example, toast it. Dry snacks such as popcorn, unsalted tortilla chips and dry crackers work well for kaphas.
Table 11-3 shows you the foods that are best for a kapha diet.
Table 11-3 Balancing Foods For Kapha
|
Vegetables |
All bitter greens, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, sweetcorn, green beans, leeks, lettuce, peas, potatoes, mushrooms, carrots, celery, broccoli, garlic, onions, green/red peppers, beetroot, kale, watercress, turnips, swede, radish, cooked tomato, bok choy |
|
Fruits |
Apples, cherries, mango, pears, figs, pomegranate, prunes, plums, raisins, apricots, cranberries, star fruit, kiwi, persimmon, peaches, berries, dried fruit snacks |
|
Dairy |
Avoid dairy in general, but focus on ghee, goat’s milk, lassi, goat’s milk butter, paneer and buttermilk when you must have dairy |
|
Legumes/seeds |
Split peas, rice cakes, black-eyed beans, mung beans, red lentils, tur dal, chickpeas, soya milk (heated), tofu (hot), aduki beans, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, flax (toasted) |
|
Grains |
Millet, barley, corn, oats (dry), seitan, polenta, rye, buckwheat, quinoa, small quantities of basmati rice |
|
Meat |
Chicken, turkey, rabbit, quail, pheasant, fish, shrimp, venison, eggs |
|
Oils |
Corn, canola and sunflower oil, and almond oil in small amounts |
|
Herbs/spices |
Black pepper, chilli, ginger, mustard, nutmeg, cloves, bay leaves, allspice, cardamom, cayenne, marjoram, cumin, caraway, cinnamon, basil, anise, asafoetida, turmeric, sage |
Preparing foods for pitta
If you’re predominantly pitta dosha, your qualities are lightness, liquidity, sharpness, heat and slight oiliness. Throughout the year, but especially in hot weather, you benefit from nourishing, cooling and sweet foods.
Pittas have voracious appetites and need to be mindful of not eating too much in one go.
To keep your constitution in balance, favour the naturally sweet, bitter and astringent foods that Table 11-4 shows, and follow these guidelines:
You can eat raw foods and enjoy salads and refreshing cool drinks – especially in the summer. These foods tend to contain bitter and astringent flavours, which are good for you.
Eating only light or dry foods aggravates pitta, so make sure you include a good quality protein. Beans are excellent, because they provide astringency.
Wheat products and heavier foods help keep you in balance. Try spelt bread, which is made from an older form of wheat and is easier to digest.
Tofu in all its various forms is a good choice for you because it’s cooling in nature and made of soya beans, which have an astringent quality.
Keep your fluids high in hot weather and take advantage of the abundance of fresh sweet fruits.
Don’t eat when you’re upset or angry; you’ll suffer from indigestion and headaches.
Table 11-4 Balancing Foods For Pitta
|
Vegetables |
All bitter greens, fennel, asparagus, cucumber, artichoke, broccoli, squash, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, parsnip |
|
Fruits |
All sweet ripe fruits, pomegranate, figs, dates, melons, pears, pineapple, prunes, raisins, coconut, grapes, mango |
|
Dairy |
Ghee, unsalted butter, cottage cheese, goat’s and cow’s milk, mild soft cheese, sweet lassi, sorbets, buttermilk |
|
Grains |
Barley, quinoa, cooked oats, rice (brown, wild, white), amaranth, wheat, spelt |
|
Legumes/seeds |
Mung beans, chickpeas, soya beans, tofu, soya milk, oat milk, almond milk, split peas, tempeh, green lentils, kidney beans, haricot beans, butter beans, lima beans |
|
Meat/eggs |
Brown trout, rainbow trout, rabbit, chicken, turkey, egg white |
|
Oils |
Avocado, coconut, olive, sunflower, soy, walnut, hazelnut and sesame oil (all in moderation) |
|
Herbs/spices |
Fennel, aniseed, turmeric, cinnamon, coriander, mint, liquorice, lemon grass, rose water, saffron, peppermint, dulse |
Choosing wisely if you’re vata
If vata is prominent in your constitution, you are by nature delicate; your digestive capacity is erratic and prone to problems with gas. Therefore, your daily diet should be light, warmed and slightly oily, so that your digestive system has less to do.
The following guidelines help keep a vata constitution functioning optimally:
Soak dried fruits before you eat them to avoid gassiness.
Don’t skip breakfast; your energies are too subject to fluctuations. A bowl of porridge cooked with cloves and cinnamon is great for you and will keep your blood sugar stable throughout the morning.
Avoid products with yeast, which create gas.
Nuts are a good snack for you and are best if you eat them little and often. They tend to be oily and heavy in large quantities, but have very high food value in small doses.
Avoid caffeine if you can; if not, stick to black tea in moderate amounts, because it’s astringent. Caffeine in large amounts taxes your already delicate nervous system.
Warm milk is very comforting to you if taken with a little saffron, which helps to remove the mucous qualities of milk.
Spices stimulate the flow of digestive enzymes and so are a help to the underactive vata constitution.
Overall, the message to those with a vata constitution is to consume moderate amounts and keep a regular dietary schedule to protect your precious digestion. Table 11-5 shows foods that are especially good for you.
Table 11-5 Balancing Foods For Vata
|
Vegetables |
Asparagus, carrots, cooked onions, cucumber, leeks, olives, sweet potato, parsnip, pumpkin, watercress, courgettes, well-cooked greens, green beans, garlic, avocado, seaweed |
|
Dairy |
All dairy and ghee is acceptable in moderation |
|
Fruit |
All sweet fruits, rhubarb, peaches, papaya, mango, lemons, limes, grapes, grapefruit, figs, coconut, dates, berries |
|
Grains |
Cooked oats, all types of rice, amaranth quinoa, wheat, couscous |
|
Legumes/seeds |
Lentils, split mung beans, miso, soya milk, oat milk, flax seeds, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, macadamia, all nuts |
|
Meat |
Beef, chicken, duck, turkey |
|
Oils |
Most oils, such as sesame, peanut and olive oil |
|
Herbs/spices |
Saffron, black pepper, salt, tamari, ajawan, anise, sage, turmeric, rosemary, fennel, dill, cayenne, asafoetida, cinnamon, bay leaf, cumin, basil |