4. Reduce Cravings, Lose Weight Naturally!

You can lose a lot of weight if you can just control your cravings. Ayurveda has several suggestions for getting control of your eating habits without any stress or strain.

You don't have to force yourself to do anything in Ayurveda. If you follow the suggestions in the articles on this blog you will be amazed as to how happy you are while your weight goes down and you become heathier.

The main thing you need to do to lose weight, according to Ayurveda, is to strengthen your digestive system. The digestive system is part of who you are. It is affected by your thoughts, emotions and environment. If you are happy, your digestive system will tend to be strong.

Food cravings happen because there is some "lack of satisfaction". It's an emotional thing (unless you have been starving yourself in an effor to lose weight, which is definitely a no-no in Ayurveda).

In another article I give you several "rules" of how to listen to yourself during the meal so you have more satisfaction. If you've got the basics from the previous article, the next level is to get in touch with your taste. You can reduce cravings by managing the taste of what you eat.

Ayurveda recognizes six different tastes: Sweet, salty, sour, bitter, astringent and pungent. Each taste corresponds with different aspects of the physiology. The experience of taste is the body's way of understanding what it needs. In order to feed all aspects of your physiology you need to have all six tastes in every meal.

If you neglect a taste, some aspect of the body will remain deficient and won't get the nutrition it needs. This causes you to have cravings. Cravings for certain foods or tastes is your body's way of telling you that you need certain nutrients.

I'll get into a lot more of the details of this in later articles. For now you just need to understand that you need to pay attention to the taste of the foods you eat.

Each taste is part of a group of foods that correspond to your physiology, as defined by Ayurveda. So, if you find yourself craving sweet foods, instead of eating lots of desserts you can experiment with astringent, dry or cold foods because they are all part of the same group of foods.

Since all these types of foods serve the same parts of the physiology, you can satisfy the craving without worrying about getting fat from eating too many sweets. (I'll list out the details of menu planning in later articles).

With some listening to your body and an understanding of the group of foods that the taste corresponds with, you can reduce cravings while giving the body the vital nutrients it needs to be healthy.