About

Welcome to Season 3 of the Body Wisdom Podcast with Dr. Michele. This season the podcast will be focusing on healthy habits. As your host, I’ll be recording solo episodes which will answer some of the most common questions I’m asked as a physician such as “how do I build a new habit?” "which habits are essential to get healthy again?" "what can I do to lose weight?" "how can I look and feel younger again?" "how can I start exercising again if I haven't done it in years?" and more. I will also be coaching patients and clients live on-air, and conducting interviews with other health & wellness experts. Of course, I am always open to new topic ideas, so if there is a topic you would like me to address or if there is a question you would like answered, please reach out. Email me directly at dr.michele.colon@gmail.com. Today Dr. Michele discusses "Ayurvedic Guidelines for Healthy Eating." I hope you enjoy the show! About Dr. Michele: As a physician & surgeon, certified Ayurvedic and Autoimmune health coach, yoga/anatomy teacher, and overall health & wellness expert, Dr. Michele Summers Colon is an Advocate for Women's Health. Her passion is helping women help themselves to heal their body. She is the author of Body Wisdom: 10 Weeks to Transformation, the creator and host of the Body Wisdom with Dr. Michele Podcast, and the leader of the Body Wisdom Membership Program. She has been interviewed and quoted in many prominent publications including USA Today, US News & World Reports, Health Magazine, Yahoo! Makers, and Bloomberg BusinessWeek. One of Dr. Michele’s greatest strengths is her ability to help women create balanced, healthy lives by looking at the whole picture. She combines the best of Eastern and Western medicine to create individualized health & wellness plans for her patients and clients. For over 24 years, Dr. Michele has dedicated herself to maintaining a private medical practice and providing exceptional care to her patients while at the same time studying holisitic and integrative medicine. Dr. Michele believes that food is medicine and that yoga, Ayurveda, and meditation are the keys to perfect health. Dr. Michele has a Bachelor’s degree in Physiology from UCBerkeley, a Master’s degree in Biomedical Sciences and a Doctorate degree in Podiatry from Barry University, and graduated from a Foot & Ankle Surgical Residency in Los Angeles. Dr. Michele is also certified in Ayurvedic as well as Autoimmune Health Coaching, Yoga, Reiki, Reflexology, and Laser Therapy. Dr. Michele specializes in Yin Yoga, Restorative Yoga, and Therapeutic Yoga to provide the most healing, relaxation, and rejuvenation to her patients and clients. Dr. Michele has studied Ayurvedic Medicine extensively and has worked with some of the best practitioners throughout the United States to bring Ayurveda to the forefront of medicine. Combining yoga, Ayurveda, and meditation is one of Dr. Michele’s passions so that she can spread the word to as many people as possible that this is the path to perfect health. Show Notes: There are a lot of ideas of how we should eat: eat 6 small meals a day, eat 3 meals a day, intermittent fasting, and the Ayurvedic theory of eating according to your dosha. Ayurvedic Theory: It’s based on the GI tract and how your digestive system works.  We create a backlog in the digestive tract if we meal stack, so we shouldn't eat one meal before the previous one is digested. It could look something like this: we have food in the large intestine that we ate 6 hours ago and food in the small intestine that we ate 4 hours ago and now we have food in the stomach that we just ate. This is causing a backup of food. If we eat something, it goes into the GI tract and is now sitting in the stomach being digested. If we then eat a snack a little while later, we have food in different phases of digestion, adding undigested food to partially digested food, which will then cause digestion to slow down and work harder to digest all of the food that are in these different stages of digestion. The problem with this is it doesn’t deal with the law of pulsation, between empty and full. When we have a lot of little frequent pulsations by eating several small meals in a day, we don’t get to experience true emptiness and true fullness. It also has to do with deep peace. There is a stillness that comes from emptiness, and there is a stillness that comes from fullness too. And we can really tell what we want when we’re really hungry. When you don’t know what you want to eat, like when you open the fridge or the pantry door and just stand there looking at the food choices and you can’t decide what to choose, you’re not really hungry; you are eating because of something emotional that’s going on. When you’re truly hungry, you will know what you want to eat and you will eat something. You are in tune with your desire. This is why yogis go into a fast at least twice a year, at the beginning of spring and the beginning of fall. Some of us do it four times a year, with the change of seasons. We detox to awaken our desire. Desire is smart. Smart desire is different from this kind of unsure desire. If you’re having an unsure desire to eat, not knowing what you want to eat or eating too many times in a day, you are just getting bounced around and you may think “oh I’ll just have another snack.” This desire to eat is not coming from being deeply hungry and wanting deep satiation. This is where a lot of cravings and addictions come from because we are not comfortable with the emptiness. We are not feeling that deep peace of stillness and emptiness. If you are not a meal stacker, you know the feeling of being ready to eat, of being ready to receive food, because you are empty. When you are empty, your blood sugar will shift your metabolism into a state of fat metabolism and you will be ready to replenish your blood sugar. With meal stacking, we may have food in all of these phases of digestion, and as these foods build up, there is less energy available for everything else. There is not even enough energy for the food that is coming in to be digested completely. So there is a backup or a traffic jam of food, and we don’t want that feeling. We want a feeling of clarity. Even after we have a big meal, we want to have the feeling of being ready to receive. We don’t want to feel exhausted after a big meal. When food is backed up, what happens next is that there is an accumulation of ama, or toxins. If you are more vata, you will have a vata accumulation in your colon. The feces will get dry and hard, it will push back up and you will end up getting bloating. You can even start having pressure on the heart muscle because there is no room for the heart to drop. When air is trapped, it gets hard. Imagine air in a balloon. When too much air is forced in, the balloon gets really hard. The same thing happens in your digestive tract when air gets trapped. The bloating is so intense that it will hurt and get really hard and feel like cramping. For pittas, there is a different kind of ama accumulation. It will get acidic. Either there will be loose feces if the pitta goes down or heartburn if the pitta goes up. Excess Kapha accumulates in the stomach, and Kapha is associated with heaviness and water and mucus, so there is a buildup of a feeling heaviness in the stomach. So Kapha will have a slow digestion and there won’t be much appetite. Because the entire digestive tract is all surrounded by blood vessels that are trying to get nutrients into the circulation, you can imagine how excess vata gets picked up from the colon and enters the blood as excess air, how excess pitta gets picked up from the small intestine and brings an acidic nature to the blood, and excess kapha gets picked up from the stomach and circulates heavy dense qualities in the blood. The excess vata will come down as gas in the colon through the anus or will go up as bloating as I mentioned before, the excess pitta will come up as hyperacidity or down as loose stool, and the excess kapha show up as excess mucus in the lungs and sinuses. Then the excess doshas will circulate in the blood and enter the mind. Vata will show up as anxiety or a feeling of being ungrounded or overwhelm, pitta will show up as irritation, and kapha will show up as depression or lethargy. And then they move on to the weak points in the body. They can end up in the joints and you wake up feeling ama in the morning as stiff joints. If we feel stiffness in our joints in the morning, this is a good sign that we want to go toward emptiness and we want to do deeper into our digestion to feel lighter. So we might want to start off with a green juice for breakfast, or take in more smoothies and soups, because these are lighter foods. This will allow the doshas to start to clear from the digestive tract. When the doshas build up in the GI tract because we’re meal stacking or because we are not eating at regular times, it’s not good because we are wasting so much energy. The doshas start to over accumulate and circulate in the blood, and then settle in the mind-body. This creates a backlog of stuff like those emotions I mentioned earlier (anxiety, irritation, or depression) in the mind as well. This is the emotional-gut reaction that so many people talk about now, but Ayurveda has known this for over a few thousand years. In terms of the doshas, eat twice a day if you’re kapha and eat 3x a day if you’re pitta or vata. If you’re convalescing or have a really weak digestive system, you can eat 4x a day. We want these pulsations to stabilize our meals. Eat regularly at the same time every day. Then agni (digestive fire) knows when to show up to digest our food. Main agni shows up in the middle of the day around lunchtime, so that is why we want to eat our biggest and heaviest meal for lunch. We want to fast in between meals. We should only be taking in water between meals. This is especially true between the evening meal and breakfast so there is more than 12 hours of fasting occurring during the night, when it is dark. We want to eat in daylight hours. There are some exceptions of course, like in winter when it’s dark before 6pm, that’s a great time to eat easily digestible food like broths, soups, and stews. Again, make sure to eat foods that are harder to digest at lunch when agni is strongest. It may sound straight forward and basic on the surface. Just eat mindfully. When we really do it, we start to see massive shifts. We will have to shift a lot of relationships, even if it is just our relationship with food or our relationship with ourselves and how we spend our time. Eating healthier is a trajectory. We never arrive. We simply become more wise at nourishing the complexity of who we are with the simplicity of our informed habits. Let’s go a little deeper into healthier eating guidelines. It really starts with feeling in touch with what our body wants. Do a body scan. Start with hands on your belly, and feel the breath. This is a simple way to tap into relaxed breathing. The idea is that we are in touch with what is going on inside, like how do I feel, where is my breath moving, how does my belly feel, how does my heart feel, how does my womb feel, how does my brain feel, how does my back feel, what would help me feel better, what emotions are present right now taking space, am I ready to receive or am I full, am I content, if I am ready to receive what am I ready to receive? Start there with the qualities, or the gunas. Am I ready for something that is heavy or light, do I want something that is warm or cool, what tastes would feel good right now, something spicy or sweet, do I want something soothing or energizing? In the most basic way, let’s notice what we really want if we are ready to receive, what does the body really want, let ourselves choose viscerally, trust our cravings, trust the body, be connected, and then enhance the connection. Eating is a celebration, even when our food is simple. These are some basic Ayurvedic healthier eating guidelines: Be hungry. Be ready to receive. Don’t confuse thirst and hunger. Drink room temperature water or warm water between meals to clarify this relationship. Eat really good nutrients for breakfast like a simple cereal or a green smoothie. Start out on track. Eat during daylight hours. Have a satisfying lunch. Notice the prana in your food. Don’t be distracted. Pause and experience gratitude. Love your food and those who prepared it before it becomes your body. Notice the tastes and how they change as they mix with your physiology. If you tend to overeat, focus on getting full with more senses than just your tongue. Or eat a big salad using orange juice for dressing with no fat. Fast between meals, drinking only water. Eat just as much and as frequently as your body needs. Be honest. Vatas eat 4 times per day, Pittas eat 3 times a day, and Kaphas eat 2 times a day. Relax after eating. After a big meal, rest for 15 minutes and then walk. Eat a light dinner, leaving time to digest before bed. Learn about your constitution. Eat for your individual needs. Eat your ecosystem. The outer ecosystem is becoming your inner ecosystem (your body). Simply honor what is happening, and the intelligence of the process will refine itself through you. Prepare your own food. Shop or harvest from your body’s needs and desires. Get on schedule. Eat green. Click here for your: Healthy Eating ebook. Namaste, Dr. Michele ****************************** If there is a topic you would like me to address or if there is a question you would like answered, please reach out. Email me directly at dr.michele.colon@gmail.com or schedule a coaching call with me so we can dive deeper to find out what is going on and come up with a plan of action for you: drmichele.com/schedule Today’s show was brought to you by the Body Wisdom Membership Program. For more information, head on over to my website drmichele.com and click on the JOIN NOW or WORK WITH ME tab. All of the information is there about my group programs as well as 1:1 coaching. If you have questions about your health that you would like me to answer on air, you can email them to me or go to my website drmichele.com/get in touch to contact my team. If you have questions you’d like to discuss with me directly, sign up for a coaching call at drmichele.com/schedule.