Bodhimed

A challenge that comes up a lot with my patients is how to make time to prepare real, nutrient-dense meals.  Believe it or not, this crucial piece to your overall health does not have to be time-consuming.  Whether you're an athlete, a nursing mom, or just a busy person, you can easily incorporate highly nutritious superfoods into your meals.  Given the stresses of today's modern lifestyle, it's more important than ever to take advantage of super nutritious foods.  Number one, you get some serious bang for your buck.  And when you feed yourself real nutrition, your appetite and cravings naturally fall into balance.

What is a Superfood?

Superfood is a term used to describe foods that are extremely nutrient-dense.  Superfoods have been used throughout time by most cultures around the world to increase energy, vitality and endurance.  Thanks to online shopping, now we can order superfoods from all around the globe.  Some of these exotic superfoods you may have heard of: acai, goji berries, maca root, mangosteen, amalaki, hemp, blue-green algae.  Many common fruits and vegetables are also super nutritious: blueberries, kale, and pomegranate, to name a few.

The great thing about superfoods is that when you eat a meal composed of these nutrient-dense items, you supply high-quality, readily available nutrition to your cells.  So your body actually gets nourished and doesn't get as hungry as often.  Cravings for empty foods - processed foods - go away.  When you look at all the foods in your typical meal, how many of them are nutrient-dense, and how many are relatively, or totally, empty? 

If your food is empty, no wonder you get hungry just a short while later. Your body is still starving for nutrition.

This Week's Focus: Chia Seeds

If you're one of the millions of people who suffer from low blood sugar, you probably have been advised to eat frequent, small meals throughout your day.  Believe it or not, this advice is totally the opposite of what traditional Ayurvedic medicine recommends.  As you've likely heard me say a million times, Ayurveda teaches that the root cause of all disease is improper digestion.  So with this focus, you can trust Ayurveda to have a very thorough understanding of what optimal digestion is! What I'm about to explain to you may be contrary to what you've heard, but if you'd like to uncover the underlying cause of your blood sugar instability, check this out.

What Happens When You Eat Frequently

In our society, food is everywhere.  It's almost hard to avoid eating all the time!  Except breakfast, which people tend to skip.  (Click here to read about the importance of breakfast.)  But let's say you eat breakfast, and then around 10 am you have a muffin, or fruit, or nuts.  Healthy snack, right?  Well your digestive fire, your metabolic process, now turns its attention to the new food coming in.  The problem here is that during the 5 or so hours between meals, you are really supposed to be burning fat, not new food.

Fat is our calm, stable, non-emergency fuel. 

Stored in there, too, are all the fat-soluble toxins from the environment.  So fat burning is totally crucial! Not just for weight loss, but to detoxify our bodies and also release the essential fatty acids and stable fuels that regulate our blood sugar levels, and in turn our mood and energy level.  If we're constantly giving our digestion new food to focus on, then we never enter fat-burning mode.

Have you ever wanted to make sea vegetables a part of your family's diet but just didn't know how?  Sushi is a common way to get seaweed into a meal, but it can be pretty time consuming.  I love the following recipe because it's really easy to make and totally delicious.  Sea veggies should be a regular part of your diet because they are high in minerals, trace elements, and B vitamins.  The high iodine content in seaweed makes it the ideal choice for anyone with thyroid issues.  And from an Ayurvedic perspective, the cooling energy of vegetables from the sea balance the entire body during the heat of summer.

Seaweed Saute Recipe

The best sea veggies to use in this recipe are hijiki or arame.  They are small and almost the same texture as the noodles they can be served with!

1/2 cup hijiki or arame

3/4 cup grated carrots

3/4 cup diced yellow onion

1 Tbs. coconut oil

1 1/2 tsp. tamari

1 Tbs. raw honey

1/2 tsp. grated ginger

pinch of cayenne

1 tsp. toasted sesame oil

1 Tbs. toasted sesame seeds

1 package of soba, udon, or rice noodles.

Rinse the seaweed with fresh water and then soak for 30 minutes.  Drain and rinse once or twice more. 

Saute the carrots and onions in coconut oil for 3 minutes.  Add seaweed to veggies and toss over heat for 2 minutes.  Add tamari, honey, ginger and cayenne.

Cover and simmer for 10 minutes. Remove cover and simmer away any excess liquid.  Remove from heat and toss with sesame oil and sesame seeds.

Serve over udon, soba or rice noodles.  It's even good cold.  I promise you and your family will love this!

What if I told you that there was a way to satisfy your sweet tooth without actually eating anything sweet?  By changing what you think of as sweet, you can really accomplish this.  Ayurveda and Traditional Chinese medicine both emphasize the need to include all six tastes in your daily diet, so we still want to acknowledge the importance of the sweet flavor, just not sugar itself.  Here's a revolutionary way for you honor your sweet cravings without feeding the desire for sugar.

Empty Sweets vs. Full Sweets

Traditional Chinese Medicine makes a beautiful and radical distinction between empty sweets and full sweets.  Empty sweets are treats containing any sweetener.  I'm talking raw sugar, honey, maply syrup, agave, brown rice syrup, barley malt syrup.  You get the picture.  While some sweeteners are certainly healthier than others, the point is that they are still empty sweets.  They are called "empty" because while they momentarily satisfy a sweet craving, they do nothing to nourish our digestion, so we are left wanting it more and more.