Food is a huge part of modern culture.
You can’t walk down the street without seeing food establishment advertisements. Soulful home cooking to your right, pungent Indian to the left, Italian down the street, and a bakery across the way. We eat when we’re happy, sad, tired, frustrated, grieving, and going through all the ups and downs of life. Food seems to be such a huge part of our society yet as a whole we don’t seem to give our food the recognition or respect it deserves.
Eating is a powerful process. It is something we all must do. What we choose to consume and how we choose to consume it can make food a healing medicine or destructive poison. In the past, I have found myself eating when I was not hungry or forgetting to eat and binging at the end of the day. I would fluctuate between overeating/undereating and dieting. My relationship with food reflected my relationship with myself. I lacked harmony and acceptance in my relationship with food because I lacked acceptance for myself and the world around me. Have you ever experienced patterns like these? This is why I have adopted conscience eating as a part of my daily self-care.
Ayurveda has a wide understanding of how to keep our digestion running well. I started practicing these conscious eating habits while recovering from a nervous breakdown. During this time I wasn’t in the best place. I found myself underweight and anxious with many symptoms of a vata imbalance.
I needed help…
Through adopting Ayurvedic principles in my life I have been able to ground and grow my self-care practices to heal the anxiety by nourishing my body. You may not be experiencing these specific symptoms nevertheless bringing consciousness to your eating habits will improve your relationship with your food, yourself, and build your understanding of what self-care truly is.
In Ayurveda, the digestive system is the breeding ground for how our whole body feels.
A clean and clear gut is a clean and clear body and mind.
When our Agni (ability to digest) is heavy and sluggish it weighs down our body and creates fatigue in the mind.
The principles of Ayurveda teach that balancing the agni is an efficient way to bring healing to many symptoms we may experience.
This is where conscious eating can be very helpful.
What is Ayurveda
Ayurvedic medicine is one of the world’s oldest holistic healing methods. It was developed more than 3,000 years ago in India and is still practiced today by millions of people.
It’s based on the belief that health and wellness depend on a balance between the mind, body, and spirit. The main goal of Ayurveda is to promote good health, and not to fight disease. But treatments may be geared toward specific health problems. In Ayurveda, there are three Dosha types that a human can embody. Everyone has these three types within them, but they are harnessed to different degrees.
Through working with an Ayurvedic doctor you can find exactly what is out of balance in your dosha and how you can live a more peaceful and in tune life!
11 Ayurvedic Conscious Eating Practices
- Taking a few deep breaths into the belly and becoming present with the meal
- Acknowledging gratitude for the food
- eating in a calm, clean, relaxing environment
- Allowing yourself to calm down before eating when stressed, angry, or overwhelmingly emotional
- thoroughly chewing food to avoid any big chucks lodging in the colon
- Eating until your first burp (I will be discussing this further in the future)
- Avoid snacking. Eat every three to five hours. Three meals a day.
- Removing frozen and cold foods from our diet
- Lightly sauteing food if we notice bloating or gas after eating raw vegetables
- Including a grain in our lunch and dinner
- Adding ghee or other fats to our diet to allow better assimilation of nutrients
Benefits of Ayurvedic conscious eating
- Understand and grow out of emotional eating
- Develop a habit of eating when hungry and stopping when full
- Relieve IBS symptoms
- Relieve fatigue after a meal
- Clear your mind
- Calm Anxiety
- Put a pep in your step
- and much more as you go deeper into the practice.
Please feel free to reach out through email I would love to talk!
Much love
Sonata
