Ayurveda’s Top 5 Digestion Tips- that you probably haven’t heard before
By Kimber Jones
Ayurveda is the health and wellness system from ancient India. It was developed alongside yoga thousands of years ago. And even though the wisdom is ancient, modern knowledge is catching up to what we’ve known for thousands of years:
It all starts in the gut.
Ayurveda would say you are only as healthy as your digestive capacity. And you’re only as old as your digestive capacity. Unlocking the keys to vitality and longevity? Yes please!
So how do we care for our digestion in a way that is actually supportive? *Hint* it’s not probiotics, cutting out sugar, or doing the Whole 30. Ayurveda is the art of eating. It teaches us that HOW we eat is just as important as WHAT we eat.
So here are five ways you can start to make the ancient knowledge applicable to your everyday life:
Eat Last- after shower, exercise, and sex
When we ingest food, our circulation prioritizes sending blood to our stomach. Makes sense, right? As our body is actively digesting food, send blood flow where it is needed. What this means practically is that we don’t want to follow up eating with activities that are going or prioritize blood flow elsewhere. When you exercise, take a hot shower, or roll in the sheets, you are asking your body to take that precious blood flow away from the main stage- the stomach, and send it elsewhere, thus weakening your digestion. The solution? Eat last. Do those other fun activities first, and eat after them so your body won’t have any competing priorities as it decides where to send blood.
Only eat to ⅔ full or the first burp. Don’t eat when you’re not hungry.
Ayurveda wants us to get in touch with what full and satiated feels like, and also what empty feels like- that chicken scratching feeling in your stomach when you are really hungry. Getting back in touch with our hunger and satiation cues means we can trust when our body is ready to receive nutrients and digest them properly. One of the quickest ways to reduce your digestive capacity is to overeat. So if you’re not familiar with what that feels like- how do you know? Eat until you feel ⅔-¾ full. This might take some practice and some mindfulness to really get in touch with what this feels like. But if you’re in the VBY sphere, you’re probably not afraid of practice and feeling into the sensations in your body. Another cue from your body is the first burp. Not everyone burps when they eat, but if you do, stop at the first one. This is your body trying to release air to make more physical space in your stomach for food.
Another way to protect your digestion is to not eat when you’re not hungry. I know it sounds stunningly simple, but take a moment to reflect. How often do you:
-Eat because it’s just the time of day for breakfast, not because you are actually hungry for it
-Eat because you had plans to eat with someone else at that time, or maybe someone prepared food for you
-Eat because you are experiencing emotions, are bored, or are trying to numb or distract
Your hunger is your body’s way of communicating it is ready to receive food. When we eat at other times, our digestion might still be processing our last meal, resting, or your body simply doesn’t need food yet. Use this opportunity to honor your body’s signals
Avoid ice water and frozen foods/drinks
I know, I know, some folks are SO attached to their ice water! Well imagine this, our digestive capacity is like a small campfire that lives deep in our bellies. If you had a baby, tenuous fire that was just starting to burn through some kindling, you wouldn’t pour ice water on it, would you? Now, this analogy isn’t perfect, because of course, we wouldn’t pour any water on a fire, but you catch my drift. Just as we avoid activities that are going to steal precious blood flow from our stomach around meal time, we also don’t want our digestion to use unnecessary energy heating up our food and drinks before having to eat them. This is also a helpful tip if you feel like you need a good digestive reset- prioritize warm, cooked foods for a bit until your digestion and elimination stabilize. This isn’t to say that you can’t have cool foods and drinks, especially in the summertime, but focus on energetically cooling rather than physically cooling. Think mint, cilantro, cucumber, coriander, coconut.
Avoid leftovers
Ok so if you’re still with me after the last tip, I might really be crushing some hopes and dreams right now 😂 But in all seriousness, we are never going for perfection (in yoga, ayurveda, or life in general). Aim for a B- and don’t beat yourself up if you miss the mark, because it will happen. Just following some of these tips some of the time will still be beneficial.
So for your die hard meal preppers, let’s dig in to why Ayurveda would say such a thing. Our food is our way of bringing in nutrients into our body- energy, vitamins, minerals, etc. What we eat literally becomes our cells. But our food also carries with it prana- that vital life force energy we love to talk about in yoga. Food that has been prepared days before loses its pranic value. Think of the difference between a fresh tomato you pulled off the vine in your garden versus those leftovers you meal prepped 5 days ago. They don’t even sound enticing anymore, right? Ideally, we would love to prepare fresh food everyday, but I know our busy lives don’t always accommodate for 3 fresh home cooked meals everyday. Some tips to reduce the reliance on leftovers:
-Can you cook just once a day? Make all your food in the morning? Basically batch tasking your cooking?
-Can you make enough at dinner to have leftovers to bring for lunch tomorrow? That’s embracing the messy human-ness instead of black and white rules!
-Instead of meal prepping for the whole week, can you do the annoying prep work like peeling and chopping vegetables? Can you portion things out? Marinate some things? What are the things that make cooking take a long time, can you do any of that beforehand that isn’t the actual cooking?
Earlier, lighter, dinner- kitchen closed by 7:30
It is oh so American to have a big old meal of meat and potatoes with a dinner reservation at 8pm. Have you ever paid attention to how you feel the next day after eating late? Maybe it’s harder to wake up in the morning, you have less energy, your face is puffy or you have a stuffy nose, or maybe a thick coating on your tongue first thing in the morning.
Shoot to move dinner back and notice how you feel. You don’t have to take my word for it, you can simply run the experiment and try it out for yourself. Ayurveda would suggest at least 2, but ideally 3 hours between your last meal and bedtime. Our digestive capacity is strongest in the middle of the day, and our digestion wants to go to bed, too! Our body isn’t primed to receive food that late at night.
Try incrementally moving dinner back. I love eating dinner at 5:30, but that certainly doesn’t happen every day of the week, and that’s ok. Having a late dinner one or two nights a week won’t irreparably wreck your digestion. But start to notice the cause and effect of your dinner time.
Give these tips a try and notice if the regularity of your elimination improves, you have a bit more consistent energy throughout the day, or maybe even more mental clarity. Ayurveda has a whole lot more to say about digestion. If you want to dive in with a whole module on digestion, check out module 2 of the Integrating Ayurveda Course or the entire course can be found here.