Eating for Bliss: Diet Tips for the Unique You

Ayurveda believes that the food you eat is not just taste, smell, and satisfaction. It is also desire, feeling and emotion.

The Charaka Samhita, one of the earliest and most comprehensive ayurvedic texts in existence, links food with spirit thus: "The use of foods and drinks which are heavy, rough, cold and dry, disliked, distending, burning, unclean, antagonistic, or taken untimely ... are afflicted with these psychic emotions: passion, anger, greed, confusion, envy, bashfulness, grief, conceit, excitement and fear."

The obvious choice, it would seem, is to stay away from the "disliked and the distending." But it's not so easy to generalize. Some people, for instance, drink milk straight from the refrigerator and whistle through their day. For others, milk in any form is trouble. Even within the same family, no two people have identical food preferences.

Why? The answer lies in your prakriti or unique constitution, says The Council of Maharishi Ayurveda Physicians. Your prakriti is the sum of your shape, size, weight, complexion, energy levels, emotional responses, and health patterns, which are totally different from those of anyone else's on earth. Improper diet and lifestyle habits, environmental pollution and day-to-day stress can cause this basic doshic combination or prakriti to become imbalanced, and this basically is why disorders and disease occur, whether of the body or the mind.

Metabolism, ayurveda believes, is central to your health. Efficient food conversion, assimilation and elimination, says The Council, supplies the nutrients that enable each cell and tissue to perform its job well. If on the other hand, your metabolic processes are in disharmony, you're on the road to ill-health, just like inefficient fuel combustion in a car engine starts to form deposits on valves.

The key to good nutrition, therefore, is this: eat those foods that please and nurture your own unique constitution and help keep it in balance. And no one can have a better understanding of this than you yourself. Stepping on and off the scale a dozen times a day, or consulting the calorie charts while munching are not the right ways to do this, though. They only take the joy out of eating. The simplest way to chart out your culinary course is to develop a feel for your body and its likes and dislikes.

In conjunction with your own efforts to understand your physiology, visit a vaidya for a diagnosis of your unique prakriti or body type and individualized suggestions for maintaining balance. Vaidyas receive intensive training in pulse diagnosis. Just a few minutes of holding your wrist, and they can tell you exactly how the doshas are combined in your personality and whether one or more of them needs to be fine-tuned.

Meanwhile, paying attention to the following five principles will help you eat for health, well-being and bliss:

1. Swabhav or the nature of the food
2. Sahyog or proper blending:
3. Sanskar or the qualities of food, which change with processing
4. Matra, which means quantity:
5. Desha or location, is critical, too