Category: Summertime

Ayurveda, GI Problems, Herbal Medicine, Nutrition + Health, Seasonal Eating, Spring, Summertime

Observing the 20 Energies and How To Really Start Intuitive Eating

by Rebecca4 Comments on Observing the 20 Energies and How To Really Start Intuitive Eating

Every day in May is precious.

Where I live, the months of February through April are often the most challenging – January and the post-holiday, beginning of year hope always seem to fly by, but it’s in February, and March, and April that every day can feel like a grind. 

It’s not the sunshine that May can bring that necessarily turns it all around for me. I do love the sun and warmer days, but I also enjoy the rain. 

It’s the flowers and the fully leafed out trees that late winter and early spring lacks. The sheer density of foliage that has returned by early May.

A heavy blanket or extra padding of plant life that soothes my nervous system as I go out into the world, making everything hard, more bearable, and everything mundane or merely good, elevated. 

The twenty Gunas valued in Ayurvedic medicine.

One thing that is inevitably helpful from day to day, whether it’s in those more difficult late winter and early spring months, in May, or in the heat of peak summer, is tuning into and adjusting my food and lifestyle choices based on the energies around and inside me. What I’m referring to are the 20 Gunas in Ayurvedic wisdom. These are a set of 10 pairs of opposing qualities or energies that describe the different attributes inherent in all substances. 

For instance, a rock is hard. Feathers are soft. 
A rainy day is wet. A clear, sunny day in August in Oregon is dry. 
Fresh ginger is heating. Coconut milk and coconut water are cooling.  

What is so powerful about observing these qualities in your body and everyday life, and then using them to make subtle food and lifestyle adjustments, is that it’s a way to bring balance to your body, mind and health.

This daily adjusting is especially helpful as a preventative measure, but should also be used when there is clear illness or disease. Our body’s prefer to operate at homeostasis. Even with everything we do in our everyday that knocks the body out of homeostasis, its object is always to return to ‘baseline’ as quickly as possible. When there are too many blocks in its ability to do so, that’s when illness and disease, abnormal lab values, pain and aches, and injuries occur.  

The 20 Qualities are:
Heavy | Light
Cold | Hot
Soft | Hard
Oily | Dry
Smooth | Rough
Dense or Solid | Liquid
Slow or Dull | Sharp
Stable | Unstable or Mobile
Cloudy, Sticky or Slimy | Clear
Gross or Big | Subtle or Small

Observing and using the 20 qualities or gunas is a way to help the body system return to homeostasis. How you do that is for every quality that is out of balance, utilize the opposite quality instead. 

For instance, if I am currently experiencing hot, itchy skin rashes or acne, I know that adding more heating substances, foods, and heating spices will further increase the heat condition. Reducing the amount of spices in food, the type of foods that are hot in nature, and increasing cooling foods will help to clear the heat. Adding cooling, bitter vegetables like broccoli and asparagus and more cooling spices and herbs like fennel, coriander, mint and cilantro,  instead of eating a dish with garlic, onions, ginger, mustard seeds, and chili peppers will slowly (or sometimes quickly) assist in coming back to equilibrium. 

Or say I have a tendency towards being constipated and gassy, and I eat lots of dry, airy foods. Snacking on popcorn, granola, chips, crackers, yeasted bread, and raw, crunchy salads, which I eat while on the go, or eat while talking. All are dry and/or contain a lot of air.
A way towards balance is to increase the moisture — both through adding liquid into the foods consumed, and cooking foods until they’re soft, and by adding liquid fats and oils instead of dry, crunchy roasted nuts or seeds, etc.

A Daily Check-In

One way to begin to use this method is by doing a short daily check-in. Take a few minutes near the beginning of each day to journal or jot down the answers to these questions:

– What is Present today? 
– And What is Needed?

Getting more granular, it can sometimes be helpful to do a quick scan or review of different body systems, the mind and emotions, and the weather to help. Is something feeling dry? Hot? Slimy and mucousy? Slow and sluggish? Adjust your food and lifestyle choices with the opposite qualities, and see where it begins to bring more balance. 

As we weave into the summer months in the northern hemisphere, it’s often that the qualities on display in the environment become hotter, dryer (or more humid, depending on where you live), and this can be mirrored in the body more rapidly, especially when we likewise choose heating and drying foods. Here’s a recipe for summer that can give you a good example of how to balance the heat and dryness with cooling spices, coconut and gently cooked, more liquid-containing meals. 

Observing what’s occurring internally and externally and adjusting to quickly reach equilibrium is the very definition of true intuitive eating. It’s tuning into what the body needs rather than what the mind craves. 


If you’d like to know more, there is a free download in more detail to use this idea in the Resources section. I also work with clients in individual nutrition consultations, and as a Licensed Dietician / Nutritionist (LDN /LD) and Certified Nutrition Specialist (CNS), use medical nutrition therapy, integrative health measures, and a root cause approach to heal imbalanced health conditions. 

If you’d like to learn more about how you can improve your symptoms of imbalance, I’d love to speak with you in a quick phone consultation! 

Ayurveda, Electrolytes, Hydration, Micronutrients, Nutrition + Health, Running, Sports Nutrition, Summertime

Knowing When (and how much) Salt to Consume

by RebeccaLeave a Comment on Knowing When (and how much) Salt to Consume

Confused about whether you need additional salt in the summer or when you’re active? Or have you been avoiding salt because it’s been considered “bad for health”? 

What are the roles of salt? 

  • Salt is one of the six essential tastes or flavors. This means we need it for digestion to work properly, and it also makes food and meals taste “balanced/good.”
  • Salt is a required electrolyte for balancing water + fluids throughout the body
    • Salt helps to keep us supple and to create flexibility in the joints – no added salt dries us out and is depleting. This is because sodium holds onto water in the cell.
    • Sodium helps with water absorption from the gut. When you drink something that contains sodium and carbohydrate, you will have increased absorption of water and once it is absorbed, the water will be better retained. 
  • Salt aids in digestion and elimination of wastes
    • It’s a co-factor for transporting glucose (a simple sugar from broken down carbohydrates) across the small intestine lining to be absorbed.
    • It’s a co-factor for transporting amino acids (the building blocks of protein) into the cells to be utilized via the sodium-potassium pump in a ratio of 3:2, sodium : potassium. 
    • The salty flavor stimulates the appetite. 
  • Salt helps to support muscle contraction and muscle strength.
  • Salt helps to clear the subtle channels of the body of stagnation – these are often overlooked in modern western medicine, but are quite important in eastern medicinal traditions. 


* Salt is lost through sweat in varying amounts that are individual to you. What’s really interesting (depending on how you look at it of course) is that people that tend to be salty sweat-ers tend to crave salt more, potentially indicating they desire more salt because they lost more. But counter to this, consuming more salt leads to sweating out more salt in the skin. So it’s not yet entirely clear if you’re craving salt because you lost a lot, or you lost a lot of salt through sweat because you ate a lot of salt.

For highly active individuals, it’s really important to replenish salt and other minerals that are being lost through sweat. In addition to sodium, we also lose potassium, chloride, magnesium, calcium, iron, and others through sweat, and these minerals are all considered electrolytes, meaning they conduct an electric current when dissolved in water.

The electrolytes that are lost in the highest concentrations through sweating are sodium, chloride, and potassium, in that order. The others are lost in much smaller amounts. Because salt is primarily sodium and chloride, salt is needing to be replenished in the highest amount after sweating.

What about when I’m craving salt? Does that indicate I need to eat more of it? 

Not necessarily. Take a look at what foods or drinks  you are craving. Is your desire for salt satisfied by adding an extra ⅛ – ¼ tsp. per serving of mineral/rock salt to your meals during the cooking process?
An additional way to add extra salt to your diet is by adding rock salt and rock sugar in small amounts in warm water. You can then let them sit at room temperature if you don’t want to consume a hot drink. Or sign up for my newsletter. I’m sharing an easy homemade electrolyte drink this week.

If your cravings are not relieved by the above and you’re craving salty junk food such as chips, french fries and fried potatoes, pretzels and snacky foods, it’s likely that this is a craving representing imbalance in the body at the moment, and eating more of these foods is not going to sustainably satisfy the imbalance. 

Craving salt all the time might also indicate a need for additional zinc, and it would be good to check in with your nutrition professional to check your zinc levels and determine other symptoms of zinc imbalance – simply supplementing with additional zinc can lead to other mineral imbalances over time so it’s wise to work with an expert on this. 

Symptoms of too much and too little salt 

  • Too little sodium can lead to hyponatramia (low blood sodium), dizziness, muscle cramps, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, seizures, or coma
  • Too much sodium can lead to hypernatremia (high blood sodium), hypertension (high blood pressure), and nausea 
  • Too little chloride can lead to muscle spasms with loss of consciousness
  • Too much chloride can lead to hypertension (high blood pressure)

Quality Salts to Cook With and Eat

  1. Himalayan Pink Salt has the same potassium concentration as the human body – it also contains other trace minerals and electrolytes that are essential for fluid balance. 
  2. Redmond Real Salt (from Salt Lake City area in Utah) is similar to Himalayan Pink Salt and is also recommended.
  3. The last best choice is sea salt. Sea salt is very similar to table salt (sodium chloride), with a little more of the other electrolytes. It is less processed than table salt but our modern oceans are not as pure as they once were and thus, sea salt is going to be less of a good choice than mineral (rock) salt. We’re even starting to find microplastics in sea salt! 
  4. Table salt is the least expensive salt at the supermarket and made of sodium and chloride. It’s also what is used in nearly all pre-packaged, restaurant, and processed foods–Table salt is realistically more harmful than it is helpful. It has virtually all the other minerals stripped out of it, and has undergone intensive mining and refining processes. 

How Much Salt Should I Eat/Drink?  

The answer to this is that it depends on you, and it’s not super easy to gauge just exactly how much salt you need. I recommend ⅛ teaspoon per person cooked into meals at breakfast and ¼ teaspoon at lunch and dinner as a starting point. If you add no additional packaged/processed foods and no other salt in meals, you will inherently meet the lower end of the recommended daily amount per day using these amounts. 

Most of us are adding additional inherently salty foods to our meals such as olives, pickles, etc., or eating foods that have salt-added as part of the processing, so still keeping with the suggested amounts to add when cooking meals, you’ll likely still be within the recommended sodium amount. 

If you’re a salty sweat-er, or highly active, gauge your desire for salt, and whether it’s relieved by adding additional high quality mineral salt to foods rather than through snack foods, or mix up a batch of the electrolyte homemade electrolyte drink, if you’re a newsletter subscriber, to drink throughout the day or during workouts.

Next Steps

This is by no means a comprehensive review or personalized advice. I encourage you to reach out to me for more personalized support, especially if you need assistance with how to adjust your salt intake in and around exercise or based on your symptoms of imbalance.

Herbal Medicine, Nutrition + Health, Running, Summertime

“Healthy” versus Healthy For YOU

by RebeccaLeave a Comment on “Healthy” versus Healthy For YOU
Is this kale salad healthy? Yes.
Is it healthy for YOU? That’s individual.

Eating Right For You

A common Ayurvedic proverb states that “When diet is wrong, medicine is of no use. When diet is correct, medicine is of no need.”

Ayurveda is often considered the mother of medicine, and the oldest medical system in the world. Regardless of whether that is entirely true, Ayurveda is a traditional medical system originating in modern day India. Traditional Medical Systems, including Ayurveda, Traditional Chinese Medicine, Western Herbalism and others, use energetics of foods, herbs, and your body to arrive at balanced and optimal health in your whole self. Meaning mind and body (and soul).

The Why: Energetics Explained

Energetics means the quality that is present in the environment, your body, or the ingredient, and the effect it has on whoever is being exposed to it. The most basic energetics to work with are hot, cold, (and thus heating or cooling), and wet, dry (and thus moistening/dampening, or drying).

In most places in the northern hemisphere, the energetics of the environment make fairly big shifts with the seasons. Late winter and early spring tend to be cool or cold, and wet or damp, summer, depending on where you are located, is often hot and dry, or hot and humid (damp). Etc.

When we’re using a food as medicine approach, the best way to achieve balanced and optimal health is by eating in a way that has the opposite quality of the body or of the seasonal environment that we’re a part of – eating in this opposite approach then provides balance for the body to be at, or return to equilibrium, where health occurs.

So in the hot, dry weeks of high summer (where I live), we can return to balance by eating meals that are cooler and more wet/soupy/moist.


An example is sipping on a cucumber infused water (cooling, moist) on a hot summer’s day, or having a mildly spiced coconut-based curry (cooling, moist, easy to digest) instead of pungent and spicy carne asada tacos (heating/pungent) on corn tortillas (drying) with tomato and jalapeño-based salsa (heating/pungent). 

Likewise, using energetics to determine the right food for you vs. what’s considered “healthy,” means tuning in to your own symptoms. 

an example of cold + dry: raw walnuts

Energetics of Your Body

In addition to eating in tune with the weather outside, or the season, it’s equally and sometimes more important, to adjust meals to what’s going on in you. 

Do you tend to be a hot and dry person? Or how about cold and dry? Warm and wet? Or cool and wet? 

Dry symptoms include: having dry skin, hair, scalp, or digestion by way of constipation (either not having a bowel movement daily, or small, dry, difficult to pass bowel movements), having gas, bloating, and achy, popping joints. 

Wet symptoms include: a wet, phlegmy cough, mucous, sluggish digestion, or feeling like food just sits in your GI and smolders after eating, fungal overgrowth, a heavy coating on the tongue, swelling in the lower legs or hands, retaining water, excess weight gain that you just can’t lose. 

Hot symptoms include:  rashes, hives, skin flare-ups, having a hot temper, reflux, heartburn, feeling consistently frustrated or easily angry, night sweats, excess sweating, inflammation, feeling overheated

Cold symptoms include: circulatory constriction, feeling routinely cold, experiencing cold hands and feet, poor digestion or need to take supplements to properly absorb food and meals, feeling emotionally heavy, depressed, or sad, lack of motivation, and fatigue

From those lists, you can probably determine how you feel generally, or from day to day. Eating foods that have the opposite energetics to what you’ve experiencing can be extremely helpful. 

Oatmeal with cinnamon, stewed peaches and tahini

An Example of How to Shift Preparation of a Meal

Let’s take a look at an example of a simple shift at breakfast time. 

Say you’re experiencing lots of dry symptoms (dry skin and hair, constipation, extra gassy, and bloating, as well as popping joints). And you also have poor circulation in your hands and feet, and generally run cooler. Your current energetics are cold and dry.

Instead of eating your routine breakfast of dry muesli and chopped nuts mixed in with cold yogurt and raw fruit, a more balanced and “good for you” breakfast with similar ingredients is a cooked oatmeal (or cooked muesli), with the fruit stewed or cooked in, and some warming spices added – spices such as cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, or a sprinkle of cloves. And if you’re consistently experiencing constipation, gas and bloating, leave out the cold, dry nuts for a few weeks. Instead, a simple shift is to cook the oatmeal with a spoonful of ghee or sesame oil to provide moisture, warmth, and an easy to digest fat source while you’re returning your system to balance. 

Summary

The simplest way to describe the process of choosing what to eat and how to prepare meals based on energetics is that like attracts like and opposites provide balance.

What often confuses or sidetracks people is that when we’re out of balance, we tend to crave what makes us even more imbalanced. It’s the like attracts like part of that statement above. And, it can be easy to confuse intuitive eating and eating based on our cravings.

Next Steps

If this topic is intriguing to you, check out another article I wrote on the topic, regarding seasonal eating during late winter and spring. That article gives several spice options for adding more gentle heat to meals, and helping out your digestion.

Within my nutrition practice, I specialize in endurance athletes and digestive imbalances. If you routinely struggle with any of the above symptoms,  I encourage you to reach out to me for more personalized support.