What You Should Know About Ayurvedic Cooking

Imagine what it feels like to be able to prevent your kid’s cold with a little bit of carefully-crafted food, or to treat a headache without pills, or noticing that you look younger and skin looks more radiant without having used make-up or any special beauty products.

Or how about this . . . imagine what if feels to have a collection of everyday recipes and self-care practices that will not only give you a healthy body, but a body that you love.

These things aren’t as far out of reach as you might think. In fact, I’m going to be sharing a simple strategy from an ancient body of wisdom called Ayurveda that will get you started in this direction now.

The word Ayurveda, when unpacked from its sanskrit form, technically means the science of life. Beyond that it’s a 5,000-year-old system of natural healing that teaches you how to live in harmony with the laws of nature.

But it doesn’t matter where you first head of it. Ayurveda can work for anyone. You could be a yoga teacher, a coach, a mom, an entrepreneur, a wife, a personal stylist, a speaker, an athlete, or a 9 to 5 working woman.

And maybe you have digestion issues, an eating disorder, fatigued adrenals, constipation, low energy, or depression.

Ayurveda can work for you because the entire system is based on treating people as unique individuals – meaning it says there is not one diet that works for everyone or one lifestyle that works for everyone.

But, how do you find out what foods are best for you and what lifestyle choices will make you feel more balanced? How can you learn to use food as medicine?

And there is one key principle you must understand about Ayurvedic cooking in order to be able to choose the best food for your body in any environment. Here it is:

Let me break it down. Like increases like means that too much of any one element causes our body to go out of balance. To create balance we pair opposite elements.

For example, drink and cold drink on a cold day and your body gets REALLY cold (like increases like). On the other hand, if you were to drink a warm drink on a cold day your body tends to warm up (opposites balance).

Now that we’re in the early stages of winter in the U.S., the weather is cooler and you’ll notice that life has more airy, dry, subtle and mobile qualities to it in general.

According to the basic Ayurvedic wisdom, to feel balanced we’ll need to provide ourselves with opposite qualities such as grounding, nourishment, and warmth.