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What does Ayurveda say about hunger?

Ever wonder if we are supposed to feel hungry? Like what if you feel hungry all the time? Or what if you never feel hungry at all? How hungry should we feel?

Sometimes we're taught that we're actually not ever supposed to feel hunger so we should eat five to six meals a day to avoid getting hungry.

Years back I saw a nutritionist and was told to eat five or six meals a day to never get hungry. And what happened? I gained some pounds within two weeks! My pants were tight and everything was tight. I felt heavy. I felt just really overall kind of awful. I knew it wasn't working for me.

It wasn't until I discovered Ayurveda that I figured out why eating all those small meals left me feeling so terrible.

So, what does Ayurveda say about hunger? It is good to feel hungry! Yay!

There are three guidelines about hunger.

1. It is a signal from our digestive...

How many of you get tummy troubles from time to time? It can be such a bummer! But I have help :) 

First of all, there are a lot of different kinds of tummy troubles including gassies, bloaties, crampies, loose poops and stuck poops. But what they all have in common is that agni, our digestive fire, is not working properly.

I have three remedies to share with you that may fix the problem in a pinch and work to increase agni's strength overall.

But before we get into it, please know that in Ayurveda, one size does not fit all. For this reason, I usually don't share remedies because if the wrong person with the wrong problem tries the wrong remedy, Ayurveda will not work and/or they could have wrong/worse effects.

Keeping that in mind, I'll be a little bit general, but overall, we want to make sure that agni digestive fire is working properly. When our digestive fire is working we, for the most part, are really dang...

photo credit: This is my daughter Alella when she was teeny. We stuck a mustachio on her and...photoshoot! We were sleep deprived and slap happy. She has a pitta tongue with a wee bit of milk on it :) 

Below is an excerpt from my book In Your Elements. Get your copy on Amazon! 

Our entire digestive system is reflected on the tongue.

If you didn't know what your tongue says about you, well, I'm gonna share! Our tongue tells us a nifty story, we just have to know what to look for. 

A simple practice: Every morning, first thing, check your tongue. It will most likely have a little coating on it, so if you have a tongue scraper, scrape it a few times. Look again. If it is pink, that's a great sign. If it is white you may have ama, which is toxins or undigested food stuffs. 

Come along and let's learn what other things Ayurveda says about our tongue!

Besides a white coating, there are other things we can look for on our tongue. If there is redness, it can...

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Some of the biggest challenges my clients and students have is figuring out their food.

I know that a lot of you get confused. "Should I be eating this? What's good for me?" We go looking for online articles for answers. We go looking for online videos. We try and make all the cool recipes that people are making and sometimes our digestion ends up funky. Sometimes our minds end up feeling funky about that too because we're like, "What the heck? I don't even really know what I should be eating for me." 

I'm going to give you three ways to not overthink your food so that you can feel a little bit more empowered in this area.

3 ways to simplify your food.

The first thing is so simple. You're going to be like, "Duh," but it really is. 

1) Eat what works for you.

Write down, grab a piece of paper and a pen if you have it handy or just think in your mind. What...

 Alright, you guys. I'm going to tell you something, but only because I think you can handle it.  And I would rather you hear it from me, than hear it from one of your friends who doesn't have the correct information.

I will tell you on one condition and that is, you have to promise not to abuse it. If I give you an inch, don't take a mile. Don't get all willy nilly excited and tell thousands of your friends, "MonicaB said *hiccup* I could!"

Do you promise? Pinkie swear? Ok then, here we go. In today's Ayurvedic lesson, we need to talk about, alcohol.

Mind, body and...spirits! 

In Ayurveda, there is something called draksha. Draksha is medicated wine used for a variety of remedies including blood, liver, skin, and digestion problems to name a few. As we know, alcohol is absorbed very quickly into the blood stream. So, Ayurveda puts the herbs into the wine, which are then carried directly to the blood and dispersed where the herbs are most needed.

How smart...

Hey Monica B, I'm trying to breakfast easy, so I'm trying not to eat yogurt. Is non-dairy yogurt okay to eat?

In answering her question, I'd like to address two things. One, why Ayurveda does not recommend yogurt. Two, why "substitutey" foods are not a good idea.

According to Ayurveda, yogurt is not beneficial to anybody.

Yogurt is really not the best thing for our digestion and can cause problems. Why?

Because yogurt digests too sour and heating for pitta. It is too sour, goopy , heavy and cold for kapha. And it is too cold for vata, it's like putting their digestive fire under a snow pack. It's just too darn cold.

You might be thinking, "Sour? No, it's sweet." No, it's sour. It only tastes sweet because they have to add a ton of sugar to it because it's naturally really dang sour :) That amount of sour taste along with the cold and goopy qualities imbalances all 3 doshas. It completely dampens/extinguishes digestive fire and clogs channels. 

She...

You might look at the photo above and think "Mm! Yummy and healthy!" I look at that photo and think "Ugk. Digestion nightmare." 

Food provides the basic building blocks for our entire physical and mental bodies. We feel better or worse depending on the quality of foods we've been eating. And because we are no dummies, we know that foods like fresh veggies and fruits are better nourishment for us than a pan of brownies. (I'm not here to take away your fun. In moderation, sweeties are to be enjoyed and savored. But if you eat the whole pan...yeah, that's not good.)

So! Whatever we put in our mouths is either proper nourishment or not. And we usually know the difference between the two.

But here's something you probably don't know.

In Ayurveda, there are certain food combinations that should be avoided. While an occasional brownie won't hurt you, the consistent practice of incompatible foods probably will imbalance your digestion (gas, bloating, heartburn, diarrhea,...

Hunger becomes a problem when agni (our digestive fire) is calling for food at the wrong times because this is a fast way to collect ama (toxins) and gain weight.

Let's say we skip breakfast but then at 9:30 a.m. we're starving, so then we bring on the pancakes, and the bacon, and the sausages, and the oatmeal, and the coffee, and the orange juice. You get my drift! You have a big breakfast.

What happens when noon comes around? Are you hungry? No. But then at 2:30 p.m. agni's like, "Hey, I'm hungry!" So you have a late lunch at 2:30 because your breakfast was late.

Then, are you hungry at 6 o'clock at night? No, because you had a really late lunch. Maybe you're not hungry until 8 or 8:30 p.m. and you have dinner then.

That's too late.

Those times are all wrong, but agni's calling for food because we didn't eat at the right times according to the clock. Making sense? 

We want to eat at the right time. Otherwise we are not in harmony with...

For us Americans, it's Thanksgiving this week!

*parade* *family & friends* *good food*

For the non-Americans, these digestion tips will apply to any celebration that includes a big family/friends gathering and a feast.

In Ayurveda, what we eat is not nearly as important as how we digest we eat.

Meaning, we can pop anything into our mouth but our body might not digest the food that well. For example, we eat a salad and instantly feel bloated, or the jam-packed burrito sits in our gut like a rock, or the spicy chicken wings leave a burning discomfort in our chest. 

If our body does not digest the food properly, it doesn't nourish our body properly, which is the whole point of eating. The goal of a celebration is to be with friends and family while sharing a meal, good laughs and creating good memories together — It's not to spend a day slipping into a food coma and taxing our digestion.

The tips below...

Toxins are created by old food but not solely food. As with all things in Ayurveda, emotions, stressors, lifestyle and environment (all connected) also play a huge role in how we digest. Digestion is food, yes. But digestion also includes all information we absorb with the five senses, taste being only one of them. When doshas are imbalanced due to lifestyle, diet, negative emotions, etc., agni’s function becomes weakened or disturbed and it leaves undigested food behind.

This undigested food turns into ama (AH-muh), which is a toxic, sticky, cloudy and smelly substance that can spread from the gastrointestinal tract to other parts of the body. From there it can lodge itself into crevices causing clogs in channels, blood vessels and cell membranes. Yum!

It sounds complicated and difficult to get ama, but it’s kind of easy if we’re not paying attention. How many times have we eaten on the go, while working, during an intense conversation, or while nervous? How...