Your dosha and your diet

What makes Ayurveda’s approach to diet unique is that rather than promoting one diet to suit all, it recognises us all as individuals. Understanding your dosha, or mind body type, can be helpful in working out which foods agree with you.

There’s increasing awareness of the important connection between the gut and the brain. Clearly our guts do more than just digest food; being responsible for most of our immunity and recent research also indicates that most of the body’s serotonin is found in the gut.

Ayurveda agrees that a healthy digestion is at the heart of health and healing. It also thinks of our digestive system as being stoked by a fire and if that fire gets too hot or is too cold then we get immediate symptoms of indigestion like bloating, acidity/ heart burn or even diarrhoea and constipation. You may be blessed with a strong, balanced digestion, with regular hunger and well digested food. Or you may suffer from:

• An irregular digestion: Erratic appetite with bloating and indigestion, common in vata types

• An intense digestion: Intense hunger but a poor digestion with acidity and strong thirst, common in pitta types

• A weak digestion: Low appetite and slow digestion with heaviness after a meal, persistent sweet cravings and need for stimulants, common in kapha types

We all want to eat a diet that is best for us. However, there are currently so many different diets and dietary guidelines it’s often hard to know where to begin. Some nutritionists say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but there are some people, predominantly kapha types, who just aren’t hungry first thing in the morning. While we know they aren't always easy to do, perhaps you could try a couple of these tips throughout your week to help balance your digestion:

• Try having your main meal between 12 and 2pm, when the digestive fire is stronger. When it comes to the evening, a big meal will not only tax your digestive system but can disrupt your sleep if eaten too late in the evening

• Try to eat only when genuinely hungry as this is a sign that your previous meal has been digested

• Try to stop eating before you feel really full. Ayurveda advises to only fill our stomach to half or three quarters to allow room for our digestion to work optimally. The key to this is to chew each mouthful mindfully and listen to our bodies

• It’s great to drink lots of hot herbal teas between meals but try to limit liquids taken with food, as this can dilute the digestive enzymes. A cup of hot ginger tea 45 minutes after a meal can be very helpful for digestion

• Keep to regular mealtimes and try to avoid skipping meals which can weaken digestion

• Avoid foods which are seen as hard to digest such as excessively cold, damp, heavy, spicy, oil and fried foods. Freshly prepared food is key, when times allows

• Favour organic food that is in season for yourself and for the environment

• Season your food with common digestive spices, such as ginger, cumin, fennel, coriander, cardamom and turmeric

• Get moving! Regular exercise, such as brisk after lunch walk through the fields or town can help maintain a good digestion

Ayurveda offers a wealth of suggestions on how to nurture our digestive fire, known as ‘Agni’. It might be a challenge to take in all the suggestions we offer for your dosha, so why not adopt one or two each week and see if they have an impact on your digestion and general wellbeing? Even a small improvement in your feelings can be enough of an incentive to make gradual changes. Ayurveda recognises that there is no one size fits all when it comes to how and what we eat.

Delve deeper into your dosha and diet by reading the articles below.