Eating for Your Body Type in Ayurvedic Medicine

Everyone can be classified by the three-dosha system in Ayurvedic medicine. Discerning your dosha/s is usually fairly easy. Most people are two doshas, some are a singular dosha, and a rare person is a tri-dosha. In Ayurvedic medicine, these three separate elements are in flux within us. Vata is wind and air, pitta is fire and bile, while kapha is water, earth, and phlegm. Chopra's website says that vata is elimination, pitta is transformation and kapha is protection. Too much vata leads to anxiety, too much pitta leads to anger and too much kapha leads to depression. Finding balance as a vata-pitta, vata-kapha, or pitta-kapha is a bit more complicated than with single doshas, as these elements are in contrast to each other.

For example, if you are a vata-pitta and are having wind-related issues such as anxiety, cracking knees, arthritis, allergies, asthma, migraine, panic attacks, or over-thinking things, you need to reduce the vata with certain foods and practices, including using herbs that are relaxing to the nervous system. If you are vata-pitta, and you are experiencing irritability, anger, resentment, constipation, diarrhea, an over-active metabolism, indigestion, acid reflux, or being over-heated, you want to reduce pitta by eating foods and herbs which cool your body. If you're having a couple of each of those symptoms as a vata-pitta, it's time to reduce vata and pitta by increasing kapha.

If you are pitta-anything, you may get upset or easily confused when you don't eat. If you are a thin vata-pitta or are a vata-pitta with more vata happening in the winter, you may become so involved with projects that you skip meals or forget to eat. To stay balanced you must snack on something. Pittas have a strong appetite and strong metabolism and can eat cruciferous vegetables (unless you have a hypothyroid condition) which include kale, horseradish, radishes, spinach, cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. Although as a pitta person you may generally enjoy spicy foods and the internal heat created by them, you've got to be careful not to eat too many spicy foods, especially in the summer, or you could become quite cross and perhaps oversexed. You must eat more cooling foods such as corn, cucumber, watermelon, squash, mung beans, bean sprouts, and avoid too much garlic during the warm season.

Lately, I've been eating more of these kapha-increasing foods: goat cheese, sweet potatoes, rice, almonds, coconut, avocados, mangoes, bananas, yogurt, and lentils, with fewer onions, garlic cloves, and spicy foods. I feel so much more relaxed. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, doctors instruct everyone to avoid cold salads in the Winter, but now that I've been eating tons of salad every day like I used to, the digestive enzymes have really been increasing my digestive health. It's been cooling my mental fire, but generally my internal heat has increased improving my circulation. Also, I've been eating lots of pomegranate seeds which are a wonderful superfood, and have reduced my cravings for coffee, which I have reduced to a diluted half milk cup a day. Feeling like living plant!