Episode 6 - Eating like you love yourself: The ancient approach to a healthy diet

Episode 6 - Eating like you love yourself: The ancient approach to a healthy diet

Maria and Chara talk about the Ayurvedic approach to healthy eating along with Chara's book on the subject.

We explore:

• Why Chara wrote her book after initially resisting the pull to focus her Ayurvedic teaching around food

• How organising the book in seasons allowed Chara to address both the Ayurvedic approach to food and the application of ayurvedic Principles to people’s daily life

• How the sister sciences of Ayurveda and yoga differ in their intentions and approaches to eating.

Show Notes:

13:30

• How the oversimplification, “eat for your type” or “eating for your dosha” doesn’t give people enough information to be really useful and apply ayurveda to daily living life.

• The central theme of Chara’s application of Ayurvedic principles is the emphasis on intuitive non-restrictive eating, but how do we develop the ability to trust ourselves to individualise our diets

• We review how every person and everything has certain qualities, and that we want to use the things and foods in our life to bring our qualities into balance. See episode 3 on Ayurveda for more detail: https://www.blissbodyandsoul.com/podcast/.

18:00

• We use the example of Kale to explore how a person’s qualities meet a food’s qualities, and how, if the rough dry qualities of kale don’t agree with you, you can prepare it is a way that will yield its nourishment in a way that work for you.

21:00

• We explore some of the mistakes and myths around ayurvedic and healthy eating:

  • What does it mean to eat someone else’s diet?

  • What does it mean to neglect the fire inside?

  • Agni: want to read more?

  • https://yogainternational.com/article/view/tummy-troubles-how-to-ignite-and-maintain-agni

  • https://www.wellbeing.com.au/body/health/increase-energy-vitality-ayurveda.html

• How do you cultivate the fire inside?

  1. When should we eat?

  2. What is “eating in a minefield?”

  3. Why we eat? And how that affects the fire inside.

  4. What we eat and how it affects the digestive fire

33:30

• Tuning into the strength of our digestive fire when making choices about what and when to eat.

  1. Juicy hungry versus “hangry”

  2. Chara’s thoughts on meal planning.

36:00

• What does Ayurveda say about snacking?

40:30

• Three rules for eating like you love yourself:

  • Eat seasonally

  • Keep your fire burning

  • Choose balance

49:49

• We talk about weight: how thinking about losing weight or being a right weight is not helpful and constructive. How our cultural messages about what healthy is are not useful for most people to eat like they love themselves.

  1. How harmonising the when, what, how and why we eat helps.

  2. How the messages from the world around us can interfere with tuning into how to eat and be in a body in a way that is right for you as an individual?

  3. How the goal for healthy is about connecting to and coming back to your true nature.

  4. How to find what is truly nourishing for you?

  5. How the accessible yoga movement and the body positive movement has broadened available images of what healthy and well can look like.

  6. How Chara is trying to change the paradigm of what healthy looks and feels like with the concept of eating like you love yourself.

Resources:

Eat like You Love Yourself book by Chara Caruthers:

https://www.blissbodyandsoul.com/product/eat-like-you-love-yourself-book/

Trigger warning on body image and weight

Yoga is Dead Podcast: Vegans killed yoga episode 5: Resources page:

https://www.yogaisdeadpodcast.com/resources-vegans-killed-yoga

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