Eat Feel Fresh: A contemporary, plant-based Ayurvedic cookbook

Introduction

What if I told you that I could tell a lot about your personality just from hearing about your digestion? If you were anything like I was six years ago, you’d have a hard time believing it.

an ayurvedic awakening

Flashback to 2012: I’m sitting in the humble waiting room of an Ayurvedic doctor waiting to be seen. Pictures of Hindu deities adorn the wall—Durga riding a tiger, Saraswati sitting atop a lotus, and Dhanvantari, the four-armed God of Ayurveda. I see a monkey playfully dangling out the window, looking for his next meal; a familiar sight in New Delhi. I don’t have cell phone service, so my eyes drift to a poster of a meditating woman with colorful circles stacking up the centerline of her body; muladhara chakra, svadisthana chakra, manipura chakra. This office is a far cry from the hyper-sanitary doctors’ offices in Boston where I had spent a huge part of the past year trying to figure out what was wrong with me, but at this point I’m willing to try anything to unravel the mysteries of my health.

I’m given a client intake form and start filling out the questions. How is your digestion? How is your sleep? The questions are off to a predictable start, but they soon become a bit more personal. What sort of dreams do you have? Are you floating, fleeing, or flying? Are they realistic and problem-solving? Are they romantic and sweet? I wasn’t sure why I was being asked about my dreams in a digestion consultation, but hey, it’s India, you never know what you’ll be asked, so I go with the flow.

A jubilant woman in a red sari approaches me with a welcoming Namaste and a deep bow.

My name is Dr. Priyanka Gupta, I’ll be seeing you today. Please follow me.

I follow her through the office, the pungent scent of oils and herbs dancing in the air. This earthy smell is a stark contrast to the whiffs of Febreeze and hand sanitizer that usually accompany my visits to a medical establishment. I sit on the chair and stare at her three-foot-long braid, wishing my own could grow that long and lustrous. She reviews my health and personality assessment, and to my surprise, just about begins telling me my life story.

Oh, a LOT of Vata, I see. You must have trouble sleeping. Staying up at night thinking. You think too much.

Okay, maybe she noticed the bags under my eyes, I think.

Your joints always cracking. Crack, crack, crack. You’re too young to have back pain.

Can she see that my posture is off? I wonder as I sit up straighter.

She proceeds to look at my tongue and take my pulse.

Very low agni, she tells me, which I later learn means digestive fire.

Agni very low, not digesting food properly. Body not taking in the nutrients. Though you are eating, body is malnourished.

Malnourished? I am literally eating all day, I think, envisioning the suitcase of snacks I brought with me on my three-month volunteer trip to India.

Agni so low that body shutting down. No more period. Very, very bad. You are too young for this.

Okay, I told her all about my digestion and dreams, but how does she know about my period?

It was true. My period had been MIA for over a year now. At first I didn’t pay too much attention to my period’s absence—what girl wants her period? But after a year without it, I intuitively knew something was wrong, despite numerous Western doctors telling me to stop worrying and just get back on the pill.

No period very serious. You have all Vata (air energy) imbalances: cold body temperature, dry skin, bloating, gas, constipation, no period, weak muscles, cracking joints, insomnia, anxiety, worrying too much. If you continue like this, later in life you can get osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and worst of all, no baby. You too pretty to not have baby.

Wait, wait, wait, hold up. Did I just hear the words osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s, and infertility? This can’t be possible. I’m a Holistic Health Coach and pretty much a raw vegan. My life is dedicated to health. I have my own raw-vegan nutrition blog, Eat Feel Fresh, and eat all the kale in the world. There is no way this can be accurate.

There has to be a misunderstanding, I tell the doctor. I eat a really healthy diet—big leafy green salads, green smoothies with spirulina, açai bowls, flax crackers… I continue listing the things I eat on a daily basis in the US.

Acha, this is why you have so much Vata. No more cold, raw, dry foods. Only cooked foods. Mung dhal (mung beans) and white basmati rice with lots of ghee.

Yeah, see the thing is I’m mostly raw-vegan so I can’t eat any of those foods. Can I just take some herbs instead?

No beta, this is Ayurveda way.

Well, this isn’t going to work out, I think as I leave the office with a list of dos and don’ts in my hand. All my favorite foods are on the don’ts and all the heavy foods I stopped eating years ago to lose weight are on the dos. I figure that if I were to ever follow an Ayurvedic diet, I’d gain 50 pounds along the way and backslide to my overweight years as a young teenager. I had spent the past few years trying to lose weight and wasn’t going to risk gaining it back.

I intuitively knew something was wrong,

despite numerous Western doctors

telling me to stop worrying.

searching for answers

I went on my way, trying to self-heal with the power of Google. That year was a blur of dietary experimentation. I went paleo, keto, macrobiotic, low FODMAP, gluten-free, grain-free, and everything in between. I had flings with the Candida diet, SIBO diet, GAPS diet, and every other acronym you can imagine. I went to every kind of doctor and did every type of blood test under the sun (somehow managing not to faint). Yet I still couldn’t find the answer to my issues. I was told by a gastroenterologist that I had IBS, or irritable bowel syndrome (the blanket term for, you have digestive issues that we can’t figure out), and was told by an endocrinologist that I had hypothalamic amenorrhea (this loosely translates to, you aren’t getting your period and we’re not sure why... seems like it’s all in your head). They told me it really wasn’t that big of a deal that my body was essentially shutting down and prescribed me IBS medication and birth control to mask the symptoms. Oh, don’t worry, honey. There’s a pill for that.

I didn’t want a quick-fix or a Band-Aid solution. I wanted to get down to the root cause of the problem. Why wasn’t my body functioning properly despite my healthy diet and young age, at only 21 years old? Finally, as a last resort I came back to Ayurveda, the ancient Indian health system focused on digestion.

I acknowledged that I had a severe Vata imbalance in my system, which essentially made my body cold and dry from within. My digestive fire had become so weak that I wasn’t breaking down foods, assimilating their nutrients, or discarding their waste, hence the perpetual bloating. The excess air in my system was materializing as gas and my dehydrated colon was causing constipation. Although I thought I felt fine, my mind and body were in a constant state of stress, which I perceived as normal. I was always on the go, working late into the night and squeezing intense workouts into my demanding schedule, thinking I was super committed to fit in a cardio kick-box session on an already busy day. Isn’t that dedication?

Well, as it turns out, the Vata air energy within me had turned into a tornado, tossing all of my bodily systems into chaos. Everything from my menstrual cycle to circadian rhythms, which are all based on digestion, felt the turbulent effects. What I needed most was not another juice cleanse or spin class, but to slow down and build heat, reconnecting to my grounding Kapha (earth) energy and increasing my transformative Pitta (fire) energy.

It all made sense to me on an intuitive level. My quest for the perfect body and the perfect diet had made me totally out of touch with my body and wreaked havoc on my digestion. I was listening to doctors and following other people’s advice rather than listening to my own experiences. I had heard of the mind-body connection, of course, but never connected the dots in my own life. I hadn’t realized that the excess air in my body had created excess air in my mind, or that the constant bloating and continuous feeling of cold were directly related to anxiety and insomnia. I was astonished and eager to learn everything about this relationship. I decided to go back to India and sign up for Ayurveda school.

creating an alkaline version

I loved the wisdom of the Ayurvedic diet for its intuitive and customizable nature, but longed to create a way for it to be more alkaline, plant-based, and low-glycemic. During my studies in Ayurvedic nutrition and cooking and in apprenticeships in South India, I was continuously developing ways to adapt the recipes for a modern, alkaline kitchen. I used my Vata imaginative energy and got creative, crafting recipes following Ayurvedic guidelines with a refreshing plant-based approach. Instead of wheat-based bread, I’d use vitamin-rich almond flour. In place of rice, I’d use protein-packed quinoa. Instead of ghee, I’d use nourishing plant-based sesame oil. As a substitute to cane sugar, I’d flavor with sugar-free pure monk fruit sweetener. In lieu of dairy milk, I’d pour hormone-balancing flax milk. Instead of heavy cream, I’d use skin-loving coconut. Rather than cheese, I’d use nutritional yeast or make my own nut-based versions. Instead of heavily cooking my food, I’d lightly sauté it to preserve its nutritional benefits. Little did I know, I was creating the foundation for what would later become this cookbook.

During my studies, I also realized how much the food industry has changed in the past 5,000 years. Dairy and wheat, two staples of the traditional Ayurvedic diet, have been particularly affected by genetic modification and pesticide use. Many people today, myself included, grew up consuming extremely acidic, processed foods that simply weren’t around in ancient India. As a result, we are experiencing a rise in gut issues such as candida and SIBO (small intestinal bacteria overgrowth), as well as a multitude of physical and mental disorders that are directly linked to our food industry. In fact, an estimated 80 to 90 percent of Americans have an acidic pH. Scientists have found that cancer can only thrive in an acidic environment, and that the body handles excess acidity by producing fat cells to absorb the acid and neutralize it. Therefore, consuming an alkaline diet is the best way to naturally find your body’s healthy weight and to ward off diseases.

Alkaline foods are also lighter on the body. Whereas 5,000 years ago, people worked as farmers and led extremely active lifestyles, today we have become much more sedentary, spending most of our days behind a computer. We no longer require the energy provided by large amounts of carbohydrates and instead need more alkalizing vegetables to enhance our energy levels, cleanse our systems, and uplift our spirits.

Alkaline foods also combat toxins in the environment. From the moment we are born, we are exposed to environmental, household, personal-care, and pharmaceutical toxins. In ancient Ayurvedic times, the rishis wrote about these pollutants, called garvisha, which causes ama, toxins, in the dhatus, tissues. However, they could not have predicted how polluted this world has become, nor could they have predicted how many wrong turns the food industry has taken. Living in today’s world, we need to include even more alkaline, organic, plant-based foods in our diet to flush away the toxins we’re exposed to on a daily basis.

Shortly after adapting these changes in my diet, I felt better—not just in my body, but also in my mind. My digestion, menstruation, and sleep became regular, harmonized with the sun and moon. The constant state of restlessness I carried—needing to always be doing something and going somewhere—was replaced by a deep sense of inner-peace and acceptance, similar to the tranquility one feels at the end of a yoga class. I realized that Ayurveda is so much more than a way to heal the body—it actually shifts the very foundation of your being. Brillat-Savarin once said, Tell me what you eat and I’ll tell you what you are, but I say, Tell me how you digest, and I’ll tell you who you are.

discovering my dharma

They say you don’t choose your path, but your path chooses you. My path was to remain in India for two years studying Ayurveda, continuously reading, absorbing, and translating these texts into a modern language that my blog readers could understand. I intensely studied every book about Ayurveda, starting with Perfect Health by Dr. Deepak Chopra, and later the many works of Dr. Vasant Lad, Dr. Kshirsagar, Dr. Douillard, and Dr. Frawley. Eventually, I wrote Idiot’s Guides: Ayurveda, sharing my modern approach to Ayurvedic wisdom with many American households and inspiring a new generation of Ayurvedic practitioners.

Learning about Ayurveda was like relearning a language my soul had spoken for a thousand lifetimes. The theories intuitively made sense to me, and oddly enough, whenever I had a question while writing my books, I tuned in and realized that somehow I already knew the answer. I truly believe this isn’t my first life teaching Ayurveda, and part of my dharma, life purpose, is to modernize this ancient healing science so it can become accessible to more people, the way its sister science, yoga, has become over the past decade.

Ayurveda is not a diet, but rather a system that offers a deeper introspection on food and life. Ayurveda is a living science, one that has adapted across the centuries to fit

the needs of the people it serves. It went from being the leading medical system in India to an underground kitchen science during British rule, and it is only now beginning to resurface. This flexibility is what has made Ayurveda the world’s oldest health system that is still practiced today. I believe the time has come for Ayurveda to spread its wings and open its doors so people across the world can benefit from its age-old wisdom (without having to move to India, though recommended).

The holistic view of Ayurveda is more vital now than ever before. So many people, like myself, have grown tired of jumping from diet to diet, looking for the answer to health when it already exists inside of us. All it takes is tuning in and listening.

Ayurveda provides us with the language to explain what our bodies already know. As you read this book, you too may experience a remembrance of wisdom passed down through your ancestral lineage, no matter where in the world your roots are from. The tenants of Ayurveda are echoed across the globe: that the solution to health is to live in harmony with our nature. We are ready for a return to a system of eating that encompasses and nourishes our bodies, minds, and spirits, all of which are interconnected in ways we never could have imagined.

welcome to eat feel fresh

Eat Feel Fresh is the renaissance of Ayurveda: a refreshed,