The Amazing Benefits Of Ayurveda

Ayurveda is traditional Indian medicine that promotes balance between body, mind, senses, and consciousness. What are the benefits of this traditional medicine? How to adopt this into your diet? I'll tell you everything.

According to Ayurvedic medicine, the disease is nothing more than a movement of body and mind to seek a better balance. The symptoms are warning signs that indicate the disease will settle. But it only settles on a weakened ground. So, it is essential to fortify your land with an appropriate diet. If the food is balanced, adapted to the seasons and its constitution, the disease will be much more easily kept at a distance. This is how Ayurveda uses food as medicine. But how does it work? What are the principles to respect? Amélie Clergue Vaurès, Ayurveda practitioner of the Medicine network explains the fundamentals.

What is Ayurveda?

Ayurveda is traditional Indian medicine, it teaches how to restore and maintain the balance between body, mind, senses, and consciousness. It will treat and remove the causes of the disease and rely on diet to achieve this result. The work will be done directly on the person using his energies to rebalance physical dysfunctions and prevent the disease from taking root deeply. It is a holistic medicine, recognized by the World Health Organization (WHO), that treats each individual as a unique being and takes into account factors such as the environment, the workplace, and climate change.

According to this approach, each individual has his own Ayurvedic constitution which is a subtle blend of so-called doshas. There are three different doshas:

• Vata, which allows fluids and food to reach cells and governs bowel movements.
• Pitta, which serves to release food and is responsible for the digestive fire which is our ability to digest.
• Kapha, which forms the cells and takes care of the lubrication.

According to Ayurveda, it is the balance of the three that allows us to enjoy good health. It can sometimes happen that we feel a feeling of discomfort without any disease is detected and yet this discomfort is present. This means that the balance of doshas has been broken so we will focus on restoring balance. Ayurveda is a preventive medicine that treats the imbalance even before it is at the stage of the disease.

Diet according to Ayurveda

Food rebalancing is the first reflex of Ayurvedic medicine. The goal is to be able to keep this new mode of feeding in the long term. This is why we will combine pleasure, greed, and well-being by learning what are the right foods for its constitution. Each spice or food is used for its healing and/or purifying properties. Consequently, one will apply first not to disturb the energies and balance. Each "Dosha" is associated with specific flavors and it is by choosing the corresponding foods that we can restore balance.

The Kapha constitution requires bitter, astringent and spicy. The Vata constitution requires sweet, salty and acidic. Finally, Pitta requires sweet, bitter and astringent.

• The sweet: It will be found in honey, in some fruits, but also in all starchy foods.
• Acid: It will be found in some citrus fruits, vinegar, tomato, spinach, garlic, cucumbers ...
• Astringent: It will be found in green vegetables, green mango, green bananas, turmeric, garlic, pomegranate, red wine ...
• Bitter: It will be found in valerian, mustard, turmeric, coffee, chicory, beer, salad, and garlic.
• The spicy: It will be found in everything that is spicy like pepper, cayenne pepper, onion ...
• Salty: It will be found in seafood, naturally rich in salt.

Make good associations

According to its Ayurvedic constitution, its needs, and the period, we will play with different flavors to find the right balance.

In Ayurveda, each spice has preventive and healing properties. For example, turmeric has powerful antiseptic properties. It will clean the skin, kill germs, purify the blood, help digestion and protect the liver. It will be consumed with fat and its action will be amplified by association with black pepper, ginger, whether fresh, powdered, or juice, is a strong energetic stimulant, associated with honey, it will help fight colds and angina.

In winter, use spices to adjust the digestive fire. The Vata will tend to miss them because they have a predominantly cold constitution. So, use spicy spices will go up the digestive fire and help digestion and assimilation of food. For a Pitta, use gentle and soothing spices instead to aggravate the fire and burn food during digestion.

In the summer, we will favor rice and vegetables to cool the body. To neutralize the cooling effect according to the typologies, we will add hot spices during cooking such as cayenne pepper, cloves, turmeric, saffron.

The first effect of the vegetable is also to cool because it contains a lot of fiber and requires a lot of energy and therefore digestive fire. If necessary, they should be balanced with heating and drying spices to make them easy to digest.

In short, Ayurveda uses food for prevention and healing, using subtle combinations to strengthen everyone's ground. In consultation, we will be able to work on a newly personalized food hygiene based not only on its constitution but also its needs. Of course, food should be supplemented by good sleep, good waste disposal, proper perspiration during exercise and if possible deep cleaning at each change of seasons such as a monodiète, a detox cure or a youth. According to its constitution and according to the moment of life and its state of health (illness, pregnancy, old age ...). By the way, we will not have the same needs and the same diet.