May in Your Body

Now that April showers are behind us, May is a month of beauty and bloom. Here in the middle of spring, we’ve begun to clear out the stagnation of winter and thaw the cold, hard blockages. It’s a great time to set yourself up for success for the daylight and warmth of summer, so let’s get after it…

Lifestyle & Routine

The sun is rising earlier (and so are the birds)— here on the sunnier side of the year is a wonderful opportunity to get started with your day sooner and really seize that jawn. The first few moments after wake-up are prime time to set an intention and start on the right foot (even before you put your feet on the floor). Before you grab for your phone, try asking yourself this: “how do I want to feel about myself when I get into bed tonight?”

Because springtime is a time to thaw, clear, and cleanse from the dark, cold winter, little habits like oil puling or tongue scraping take very little commitment and aid in clearing the wastes that accumulate from your body’s nightly cleaning. If you’re really looking to dive in to a new habit, try neti pot (which helps with clearing allergens from the sinuses).

Good routine in the season of sun, growth, and light sets the stage for ample success in your days. not every moment (nor every day) will be high, positive, and progress— but finding 5 minutes in your morning to set the stage will support with stress response and resilience in the immediate moment, and health and flow in the long run.

Diet Staples

Temperatures are still volatile (especially in early may) and clearing and cleansing is still priority. but with summer right around the corner, some staple food stuffs for the month include those with dilating, cooling, and hydrating properties. What goes on inside of us reflects what’s going on around us and, while the body is adaptive, modifying your diet for the season supports your systems so your energy can be directed towards more prudent tasks.

Light and bitter greens like asparagus, brussel sprouts, or arugula are chok full of vitamins and minerals and offer a bitter taste to body tonify your insides skins and stimulate the peristalsis that keeps your wastes moving through your channels of elimination.

As the weather gets warmer, cooling foods like lime, cucumber, avocado will provide the nutrients our bodies need while keeping the system from over heating. In a nutshell, your liver processes all of the byproducts of digestion, filtering out waste before sending the good stuff into the blood stream. Because blood is “hot” (from an eastern perspective), late spring diet into summer should consist of cooler foods to keep your liver function more stable/less over-taxed.

Finally, as the heat kicks up, your body begins sweating and flushing that heat through your skin organ (like how that sounds? skin organ). We need electrolytes quite literally to exist properly, so berries, melons, pineapples (tropical fruits) are robust sources for hydrating sweetness.

What’s Next

The soon-to-arrive summer is the season for being social, being in the sun, and making plans. May is a fabulous month to not only plan vacations, but also to plan for rest and recovery. Sleep/rest/recovery time is important always but falls to the wayside when the outside is nice and it’s fun to go play. Chill, vibe, and live wholly my friends.

Proper Fueling

The fitness industry is notorious for being at the center of harmful practices regarding weight and body composition. Often times, the things that seem too good to be true are just that. Fast fixes and trendy workouts have historically come with a slew of side effects or counterproductive outcomes.

While I feel confident that the industry is moving toward sustainability and true well being, capitalism continues to center the sexy thing- whatever grabs attention regardless of bodily implications. That being said, I continue to explore ways to peel my clients and my practice away from the myths that pop fitness have cultivated. Instead, my purpose is to lean in to the simplicity of self-awareness as well as the agency of self-determination in my personal and my client’s programs.

The Myth of Calories in/Calories out

I’ll start by (hopefully) debunking the toxicity of this one- energy balance. Myths, like conspiracies, proliferate because there may be even a nugget of truth within. Yes, consumption without utilization yields surplus. The urge to reduce nuanced functions in the body is a capitalist tactic to simultaneously commodify and maximize profits off of our inadvertent ignorance. It’s predatory and, when weaponized against humans simply trying to live better, harmful to success.

Instead of focusing on calories out/calories in, a high level understanding of nutrient function can be a powerful resource in your toolbox for planning fuel practices. This doesn’t have to be complicated. The quality of those calories-in matter more than the quantity- something we’ll discuss a bit more shortly.

In fact, the body has safeguards in place for lean-time energy management. Like a squirrel gathering nuts in for the lean winter months, the body will likely retain more of it’s energy sources when it’s uncertain that it’ll be fed fully and properly. Metabolism is suppressed and resources are used as efficiently (and minimally) as possible. This is diminishing returns.

Eat food with joy when you can, that returns in dividends simply because the body can appreciate and accept the associate state of mind.

Nutrient Timing & Quality

Nothing hard is ever successfully accomplished all at once. Success, instead, comes from first putting one foot in front of another. Our desire for change mixed with the easily accessible, generic content on the internet makes for a melting pot of high expectations paired with low effort output. It’s an equation for failure. The Cliff’s Notes summary of Nutrient Timing and Quality is as follows: Eat food, eat a bit of all kinds of foods, and try not to over eat.

Nutrient Timing

When we don’t eat, our metabolism is suppressed. When that happens, we break down and assimilate food stuff much slower than we would otherwise. Our bodies are smart and economical with resources. The body identifies lean time and behaves as such. It’s goal is to best assist operations with the resources it has and, without sufficient resources, the body goes into “saving mode”. Eat food that’s the message. More on timing to follow.

Nutrient Quality

Fats, proteins, and fibers digest slower than sugars. Please note, sugars are efficient and easy sources of energy- eat those. To avoid the negative experiences associated with frequent and intense spikes in blood sugars, eat sugars with fats, proteins, and fibers. Juices, smoothies, and easy-to-grab snacks tend to lack most, if not all, of those things. As a result, your sugar spikes. When sugar spikes fast, insulin spikes fast, too. Without a readily available use for those sugars, they get stored in the liver, the muscles, and the adipose (fat tissues).

There’s an interesting stigma around fruits but, for general populations, fruits are sugary with quality micronutrients that assist most all of the body’s processes. Vegetables are typically high in fiber and lower in sugars, but are still considered carbs, they’re just more likely to flatten that spike. A bit of toast with butter? a fat on a carb. Berries in yogurt? A fat, protein, and carb. Quality nutrients, no matter their composition, will win out of poor quality, highly manufactured foods- aim for those :)

Fasting 101

To end on a buzz-word, I’ll leave you with a brief note on intermittent fasting (time restricted eating). Intermittent fasting does not mean eating less. Fasting is eating your food within a restricted window, not restricting your intake. Folks that starve themselves until 1pm, eat a sandwich, have a salad for lunch, and snack on a handful of Oreos by 8pm aren’t going to reap the same rewards that someone who’s fueling properly will. For the person who fasts until 10am, eats 2-3 full meals within the window, and stops eating at 6pm? they’ll be nourished enough for the fast that they won’t end up on an insufficiency binge.

Fasting has shown to reduce inflammatory factors on the body which, in turn, increases what I’ll call “vitality” or a climate for “longevity”. You might be familiar with the unpleasant feeling of going to bed on an overly-full stomach or getting so hangry late in the morning that you develop a hypo-glycemic headache. You fast fully nourished like a squirrel with it’s nuts in the winter, so that the lean window does not lead to depleted resources.

All of this said, behavior change is hard. Identifying, vetting, and implementing change can be uncharted territory. When in doubt, reach out! Try a few things, hit up your friendly neighborhood wellbeing professional, and prioritize the things that feel great and empowered. Life’s too short to do otherwise.

The Power of Protein

In this age of information, it’s not hard to find research that corroborates any belief. Influencers and capitalism dictate which content you’re more likely to see and fund which research you’ll be fed. As a result, nutrition- something quite simple in it’s foundation- becomes overwhelmingly complicated.

For most people, the complexities of nutrient timing aren’t nearly as relevant as nutrient quality and quantity. As you embark on your personal health journey, it’s important to tune out the nonspecific cacophony and tune into the basics.

Protein is pivotal in recovery/regeneration, glucose regulation, and ultimately makes up most of our structure-stuff, so it’s worth investigating a bit more.

As Building Blocks

There’s a reason we consume animal tissues in order to intake and assimilate protein. We are a network of collagen fibers. Fascia encapsulates the muscles and holds us together inside the skin. Fascia proliferates as it stretches and moves. Muscle is replenished and rebuilt stronger with adequate protein intake. The skin, the largest organ on the human body, depends on this sinewy protein to keep it all together.

As we age, our mechanisms for protein synthesis diminish. This results in the dread sagging skin and muscle wasting of old age. Proper functioning of both of these responsibilities is directly correlated to positive outcomes pertaining to longevity.

As Blood Sugar Support

Healthy muscle tissue not only contributes to over all strength and functional movement, it also serves as storage for glycogen. High muscle volume assists with blood sugar regulation.

When we intake carbs, the liver and the muscle tissue are the primary store-houses of any resultant free-circulating glucose. Our bodies tap into these reserves during physical activity to varying degrees dependent on the specific type of physical activity. When we’re relatively inactive, the stored glycogen goes unused. When we’re inactive and also continue to intake disproportionate amounts of carbs, what remains to be store is taken up by the cells that are associated with fat tissue.

It is important to me to qualify the mechanisms in action here because this one specific process gets all sorts of warped and distorted across platforms. Adequate protein intake not only typically blunts glucose spikes, it also supports musculoskeletal health which, in turn, aids in sugars regulation. That’s it. Please, for the love of God, eat carbs, they’re fuel. Just keep in mind the physiology that processes and stores the carbs, and use them to your advantage :)

Major Take-Aways

Much of our fast-and-easy food stuff is devoid of fiber and choc full of carbs. While carbs are essential to our health and operations, too much without enough of the other stuff can distort our energy management systems. Prioritizing protein intake benefits our regeneration and sugar regulation. Protein intake is generally recommended to be thereabouts 0.75g/kg of body weight. If you, like me, live within the imperial system, you’d take thereabouts half of your weight in pounds and remove a quarter of that. That’s it.

From there, you can identify plant, animal, and supplemental sources of protein to fill in the amount. Keep in mind that plant and animal-based proteins come with the added benefit of fibers, vitamins, minerals, and all the goodness that wholefoods have to offer. When investing in protein supplementation, do your research- some sources make you gassy, some are bulked up with non-protein content, and some may just be downright nasty tasting.

A high level understanding of protein (or really any nutritional building block) is likely to yield results for most normal people. You may find that you have increased satiety (feeling of fullness), that your body compositions shifts a bit, or that your energy levels change. If you’re looking for specific guidance for how much and how often re: performance goals or condition management, please reach out to a Registered Dietitian. Nutritionists (like me) are qualified to educate and inform, not prescribe or diagnose. Make smart choices, and make choices in favor of your future self, y’all :)

Soft Shell Tortillas

Makes about 6

what you’ll need

• 1.5 c Flour

• 1 tsp Baking Powder

• 5 tbsp Salted Butter

• 0.5 c Hot Water

how you’ll prepare it

Combine “dry”s.

Add butter + water.

Knead for 5 minutes or until dough is smooth and bounces back.

Let sit for 15 min to rise.

Cut into 6 pieces- flatten/rollout.

Lightly fry on dry pan until bubbles appear- flip and repeat.

Let cool on paper towel.

ways you can consume it

In tacos, as a quesadilla, with some peanut butter on top.

March in Your Body

March is the real turn-of-the-leaf away from the dark time and into the light time. Once daylight savings Springs forward, the days get longer, the earth begins to thaw, and we’re drawn outward. You may notice that you crave less of the heavy sweetness that the Winter called for; you may even notice your appetite diminish just a bit. Embrace that. Just like the cold, hard, and heavy winter gives way for the light, energetic, clearness of Spring, this time of year the body readies itself to shed an refresh.

Key Take-Aways

• Take advantage of the earlier sunrises and cooler air for immune and circadian regularity.

• Increase circulation to improve blood health and lymphatic drainage after a winter of “hibernation”.

• Movement is king. Dry brush, tongue scrape, irrigate your sinuses- encourage system-wide movement to increase conditions for regeneration.

Qualities of the Season

Spring is sprung at the heart of Kapha Season. It’s a biannual intersection between the dark time and light time. While the body reheats and re-energizes, it’s helpful to support the transition with easy to digest, light, simple foods. Wake with the sun and get outside. The blue light of the sunrise is a perfect way to get your systems energized in a nourishing way. Prioritize warm, light, dry, mobile, sharp, penetrating qualities and embrace bitter, stringent, and pungent tastes.

Daily/Practices

Like other animals, we too shed our winter layers in preparation for the upcoming warm season. In our case, it involves losing the insulating layers of fat beneath the skin, a natural process that differs from the modern concept of striving for a "summer body." Instead, this process aligns with the natural order, a delicate orchestra that changes seasonally to set us up for success.

Ayurvedically, this shedding can contribute to our blood and lymphatic systems experiencing congestion or sluggishness. This can lead to feelings of heaviness and lethargy. In addition, this congestion can contribute to mucous build-up, common during this time of year. Dry brushing remains a helpful practice to support the somewhat reluctant lymphatic system.

The idea of scraping, known as lekhana, can be applied in various ways throughout the season to introduce a rough and mobile quality when it's lacking. For example, tongue scraping is beneficial year-round but particularly useful now to clarify and assess the state of the digestive system through the purge.

While the body lightens up, there's an increased risk of irritants causing seasonal allergies due to changes in blood circulation. Regular Neti practice helps cleanse the sinuses, flushing out any trapped irritants and reducing immune responses.

Most importantly, spend time outdoors and stay active. Embracing our connection to nature on nice days allows us to return to its warm embrace, recalibrate our circadian rhythm, and positive impact our mental health. Engaging in activities like preparing spring gardens brings joy in witnessing new life. Our nervous systems greatly benefit from reconnecting with nature, aligning our vibes with the environment around us.

Diet Staples

March signifies the switch to bitter, pungent, and astringent tastes. Foods high in prana, or energy and life, are more easily accessible as farm stand season returns. Gone are the dark, cold months of root veggies and preserves- now is the time for fresh berries, cherries, greens, and grains!

Pungent and warming digestive herbs like ginger, black pepper, and turmeric assist the digestion, or agni, to brighten up and reinvigorate. It’s the perfect season to re-introduce all sorts of grains into the diet. Grains like barkley, buckwheat, and millet are light and mobile enough to give quick bursts of energy that will help keep the system running efficiently with the longer days.

Finally, beans and lean meats - particularly easy to digest beans and fish - nourish the system via their fiber, carb, and protein content. Because the light time encourages getting outside and getting mobile, it’s important to keep protein in a light and easily digestible form in order to ensure the body is supplied properly for regeneration.

What It All Means

The biggest takeaway is this: the sun is back, the body gets to movin in the Spring. Support your body's transition with easily digestible, light, and simple foods. As the body taps into its accumulated reserves for fuel, prioritize warm, light, dry, and mobile qualities, alongside bitter, stringent, and pungent tastes.

In daily practices, shed winter layers with dry brushing, scraping, and especially tongue scraping to assess digestive health. Combat potential seasonal allergies by incorporating regular Neti practice. Embrace outdoor activities for overall well-being, connecting with nature during this time of renewal. Circulation, metabolism, and circadian health are always primary- they are the inner clock and combustion systems that keep us regular!