By Deepti Sehgal, the founder of a self-care brand ‘Svarasya’ and is amongst selected few Macrobiotic & alkaline diet nutritionists in India.
Ever wondered what differentiates the winter diet from the diet in other seasons?
It is the energy of the season getting colder, denser, yang, inward, and contracted. This changing energy of the season must be well complimented with the food choices and cooking styles that impart more warmth and energy to the body. This is the little mantra for maintaining health in winters without suffering from any health conditions and enjoying winters blissfully.
Most diseases set in when the body gets exposed to imbalance creating foods that create a weakness at the body organs level. This means consuming foods with cooling energy in winters when nature is full of cold, contracted energy may become the cause of common health conditions such as cold, flu, cough, weakness during this time of the year. The idea is to balance the cold outside with foods and activities that create more warmth within. As per Ayurveda, the secret to optimal health lies in ensuring that our Agni (the metabolic power) keeps burning which happens when our body maintains a specific level of warmth within. Consuming cooling foods specifically in winters creates a cold environment at the digestion level which makes it an incompetent environment for the stomach to be able to process foods completely. This incomplete digestion is at the back of many stagnating health conditions including the most common ones experienced in the winter season. Additionally, winter makes our body use more energy to keep us warmer and thus needs more dense sources of energy to create health that includes foods like whole grains, root vegetables, and good fats.
The macrobiotic way of eating is the most balancing approach to eating by the protocols of the energetics of seasons. It provides a framework to understand the rules of eating by winter energetics. This framework is about understanding what foods create or spoil health during this time of the year. We seek warmth, coziness, and settling grounding energy in winters, and foods that are concentrated with energy are the best to consume during this time of the year.
Such foods include foods like buckwheat, brown rice, round vegetables such as radishes, carrots and turnips, nuts, and seeds. Cooking styles that support health and healing this time of the year include soups, stews, broths, baking, pressure cooking, dehydrating, and long pickling.
