Ayurveda + me
Once upon a time, there was a girl who thought she was healthy. She ate oats most mornings, avoided carbs, pasta was the devil, bread was bad, she was scared of fats including oils and ate a lot of fat free alternatives. She was meat free, avoided dairy because it made her feel heavy and phlegmy so she drank a loads of oat milk instead. She ran a lot, felt guilty if she didn't work out, she would touch ‘treats’ on rare occasions and only then a silly, little sliver just to try...
At restaurants she had an inward panic to find a ‘healthy option’ and she mostly always went for a salad, never a 3 course meal and sometimes she would think about walking home just to burn it off.
This girl is me. A millennial who grew up at a time when heroine chic was ‘in,’ when celebrities were fat shamed on a minute by minute basis. This wasn't an eating disorder, but reading this back is pretty wild. It is maddening how much shame, guilt, and mental turmoil is created by the simple act of eating.
I'm sad for early 20's me but honestly, is it a rare or surprising experience? Sadly no. The pressures on women to look a certain way just morph through the ages; from aerobics, leotards and grapefruit breakfasts of the 80s, to the use of diabetes drugs to drop KGs fast today.
I'm not entirely sure this shit will ever stop.
BUT.
I can tell you…
Ayurveda really cuts through the BS.
Continued…
Ayurveda tells us that food is a privilege. How lucky are we to be able to be fuelled and healed by the fruits of this earth. Food is medicine.
This ancient science teaches us that food can be our healer, or our poison. It is not only what we eat, but how we eat, what we can we can digest and metabolise and most crucially, the way we alter our diets to suit the change in season, our age, lifestyle, our constitution and especially in times of illness and imbalance.
At the beginning, studying Ayurveda was a painful experience. I had to go through a very REAL period of unlearning and facing up to the facts that my diet wasn't supporting me. My food habits, lifestyle choices and relationship towards eating went through a huge transition.
From being a strict vegetarian I began tentatively eating meat again after 10 years. I started incorporating butter and ghee, I had more awareness about foods that were exacerbating my imbalances like bloating, thinning hair, dry skin, loose stools, excess heat. I avoided salads or anything raw, cold drinks were out, and I began seeing food for the wonderful, joyful experience it should be.
Food is nature, and everything has a purpose. Once we understand the power in an ingredients' unique energetic capacity and inherent ability to build, heal, destroy, cool, heat, melt, scrape we realise what eating truly means. My respect for food now far outweighs the fear I used to hold for it. I now feel a much greater responsibility in how I feed myself, but even more so when I work as a retreat chef.
Before Ayurveda food was a necessary evil. Now it is a blessing and an absolute gift from earth.
If you would like help with reestablishing and reevaluating your relationship to food, and would like to know what foods support YOUR constitution, lets get a date in the dairy for a consultation with me.
