The Ayurvedic View on Eating Right:
Eating for Bliss: Diet Tips for the Unique You

Ayurveda believes that the food you eat is not just taste, smell, and satisfaction. It is also desire, feeling and emotion.

The Charaka Samhita, one of the earliest and most comprehensive ayurvedic texts in existence, links food with spirit thus: "The use of foods and drinks which are heavy, rough, cold and dry, disliked, distending, burning, unclean, antagonistic, or taken untimely ... are afflicted with these psychic emotions: passion, anger, greed, confusion, envy, bashfulness, grief, conceit, excitement and fear."

The obvious choice, it would seem, is to stay away from the "disliked and the distending." But it's not so easy to generalize. Some people, for instance, drink milk straight from the refrigerator and whistle through their day. For others, milk in any form is trouble. Even within the same family, no two people have identical food preferences.

Why? The answer lies in your prakriti or unique constitution, says The Council of Maharishi Ayurveda Physicians. Your prakriti is the sum of your shape, size, weight, complexion, energy levels, emotional responses, and health patterns, which are totally different from those of anyone else's on earth. Improper diet and lifestyle habits, environmental pollution and day-to-day stress can cause this basic doshic combination or prakriti to become imbalanced, and this basically is why disorders and disease occur, whether of the body or the mind.

Metabolism, ayurveda believes, is central to your health. Efficient food conversion, assimilation and elimination, says The Council, supplies the nutrients that enable each cell and tissue to perform its job well. If on the other hand, your metabolic processes are in disharmony, you're on the road to ill-health, just like inefficient fuel combustion in a car engine starts to form deposits on valves.

The key to good nutrition, therefore, is this: eat those foods that please and nurture your own unique constitution and help keep it in balance. And no one can have a better understanding of this than you yourself. Stepping on and off the scale a dozen times a day, or consulting the calorie charts while munching are not the right ways to do this, though. They only take the joy out of eating. The simplest way to chart out your culinary course is to develop a feel for your body and its likes and dislikes.

In conjunction with your own efforts to understand your physiology, visit a vaidya for a diagnosis of your unique prakriti or body type and individualized suggestions for maintaining balance. Vaidyas receive intensive training in pulse diagnosis. Just a few minutes of holding your wrist, and they can tell you exactly how the doshas are combined in your personality and whether one or more of them needs to be fine-tuned.

Meanwhile, paying attention to the following five principles will help you eat for health, well-being and bliss:

Swabhav or the nature of the food: Cinnamon, for instance, is hot by nature, while cardamom is cool. Again, clove is hot and cumin is cool. Though you can slowly develop an understanding of the various spices and their properties on your own, it can, admittedly, get confusing in the beginning. As a general rule, too, eat more foods that are cool in swabhav when the weather is hot, and switch to warm foods in cool weather.

Sahyog or proper blending:
This is an important ayurvedic concept. Just like certain plants, when sown together, grow healthier and can resist disease, so can food combinations influence the way you feel. You'll observe that yogurt and milk taken together will disagree with your system.

Result: You'll be irritable and less productive. But cook light split mung dhal with basmati rice in a spoonful of ghee (clarified butter), spike it with a spice mixture of your choice, and you've got the perfect combination for a light, nutritious meal.

Sanskar or the qualities of food, which change with processing:
Raw foods, for instance, are considered harder to digest according to ayurveda. But when you cook them lightly and spice them mildly, the digestive fires do not have to work as hard to convert them into body tissue, and less ama - digestive impurities - builds up in the body.

Matra, which means quantity:
Each of us has a certain capacity, beyond which the system has to struggle to digest food. This capacity differs from person to person and is known as his or her unique 'matra.' A change in the regular matra our system is used to will cause an imbalance in the digestive system, and in our whole physiology. Get a feel for your 'matra' and try to eat close to that quantity at any given meal.

Desha or location, is critical, too: Within the same country, there are different environmental zones, and therefore different ways our bodies respond to foods. If you've moved recently from a cold, wet place to a desert region, you need more moist, sweet and oily foods like carrots, zucchini, beets, cilantro, cumin, ghee, sesame oil and light beans. This is because deserts have a natural propensity to vata dosha in the environment. Ghee lubricates and nurtures the body from the inside, so it is especially good for people living in desert lands.

AYURVEDIC THUMB RULES FOR EVERYONE

Get the six basic tastes on your plate:
The 6 ayurvedic tastes (rasas) are an important part of a balanced diet. The idea is to eat at least a bit of each taste-sweet, sour, salty, pungent, bitter and astringent-at each meal.

Eat foods that have a saatvic influence on your mind:
Saatvic foods are those that are digested easily and nourish body, mind and spirit. They include fresh foods, milk, ghee, most vegetables, grains especially basmati rice, and light beans like mung dhal. When you eat more saatvic foods, you feel calm and poised but creative and energetic.

Be done with the first meal before starting the next:
This one is self-explanatory. If your earlier meal is not fully digested, the ingredients from that meal will mix with those in the next one and create all sorts of digestive imbalances.

If you eat for good health, eat in the positive company of pleasant friends and choose the right foods, you help to maximize not just your physical health but your emotional, mental and spiritual well-being as well.