The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine, or the slowest form of poison - Ann Wigmore
What is metabolism?
Metabolism is how your body processes food and drink into energy. Which means it determines how much energy you have. It’s also responsible for building and repairing tissues, which means that low metabolism is a major contributor in disease.
Here are the lifestyle factors that affect metabolism:
Sleep
Exercise
Stress / Mindset
Food
Today, let’s talk about food and metabolism.
Our body breaks down and converts what we eat and drink into energy, impacting our ability to move, think, breathe, and feel alive. It impacts our quality of life.
It’s helpful to know these 3 Ayurvedic terms, the equivalent of which I find lacking in our English language: Agni, Ojas, and Ama.
Agni refers to our digestive fire, which metabolizes what we consume into energy, assimilating the nutrients for energy and and cellular intelligence, and releasing the rest through elimination.
This metabolic process converts our food into energy, or what Ayurveda calls Ojas: a nectar-like substance that creates vitality, life force, balance, and progress/ creation. It’s shown in the glow of natural un-made-up skin that we see on babies, pregnant women, full-immersion in nature, and people that have fallen in love.
When what we’ve consumed don’t get fully digested, then what sits in our stomach and the rest of our bodies as they back up, undigested and putrifying, is Ama, which is a toxic substance that clogs up your body’s channels and disrupts flow. We experience this through lethargy, stagnation, illness, and disease.
So each time we make a choice in what and how we eat, we create Ojas or Ama. Life force (good health) or stagnation (disease).
So, while it is certainly important to
get enough sleep… how we eat can impact our sleep quality.
get plenty of exercise… food can sabotage all efforts.
reduce stress… food has a direct and immediate impact on our mindset and perceptions.
How do you know that your metabolism needs a boost?
You’re constantly tired. You may think it’s the busyness or lack of meaning in your life; change your food habits and see what happens.
You suffer from chronic disease and inflammation, and you’re constantly getting sick.
You easily gain weight, especially in your middle.
How to boost your metabolism through food:
Choose easily digestible foods, which are fresh, whole, unprocessed, slow or gently cooked, and spiced (I mean with herbs and spices, not spicy) foods. The older and more processed the food, the harder it is for your body to break down. Cooking and using spices help pre-digest your food so that your body doesn’t have to work so hard to break down and convert what you just consumed. You know your body is overwhelmed when you are experiencing indigestion or get tired right after a meal.
Reduce raw foods: it’s more difficult to digest. Yes, you might lose some nutrients from cooking your fresh veggies, but if you can’t unlock and convert the intelligence from that food to energy for your mind and body, you won’t be able to assimilate it. If it’s difficult to digest, it will also be difficult to move it through your digestive system to eliminate. Which means you collect Ama. If this isn’t corrected, it will back up into your lymphatics, making it difficult for that system to take out the trash, compromising your immune system and creating disease.
Avoid leftovers: make food for that day and eat fresh. Prana is life force, or energy. This is the difference between the taste of an apple from a can vs. from a grocery store vs. from the Farmer’s Market vs. picked directly from an apple tree. The source of that amazing flavor burst from the fresher apple is the life force that still runs through it. The longer it sits, and the more it gets processed and laden with chemicals, the less life force it retains. Life force is intelligence and energy. Leftovers have little life force. Ideally, choose foods made that day, and at most, made no more than one day ago. This can satisfy those that believe that “it always tastes better the next day…”
Sit while eating, and eat to eat. Multi-tasking prevents us from doing any one thing well. This includes digestion. When you’re not fully digested, you go into food coma, brain fog, exhaustion, indigestion, whatever you want to call it, and so you’re not saving time anyway by multi-tasking because your body is now working too hard to make you effective the rest of the afternoon, or to sleep well.
Check your emotions: refrain from eating your emotions. Your body has difficulty digesting when you are upset or emotional. It goes into stress, or flight-and-flight mode rather that rest-and-digest. So everything sits and putrifies, creating dis-ease.
If you can include these 5 things in how you eat, you’ll find that not only will you boost your metabolism, you’ll also start conquering your food sensitivities, and you’ll have more energy and clarity.
Happy eating!
Love, Savitree
Interesting...I thought eating raw more often was better for me.
Veggies meaning I eat more salads that include carrots, different greens like spinach and kale, lettuce not iceberg, cucumbers, then I include fresh fruit and nuts. I add what are supposed to be anti-inflammatory spices (garlic, turmeric, black pepper, cayenne pepper, cumin) are just a few that I add.
Now, it's helped me lose weight, but not reduce my stomach as much as I'd like.
I prefer my food prepared that day. It always seems like leftovers just don’t have that zing to them. No pizazz. Less life force!