Ayurveda Dietetics for Health & Beauty

Ayurveda, the traditional Indian system of health and medicine, is the most ancient and yet the most contemporary holistic science of life. Ayurveda strongly advocates its two principal objectives: ‘protection of health in the healthy’ and ‘alleviation of disorders in the diseased’.

The above two objectives are achieved through a holistic threefold approach in the form of diet, lifestyle (routine) and medication. Among these, diet is considered the most important and primary way to get good health and to prevent any possibility of disorders.

Diet has been praised in Ayurveda texts as ‘the greatest medicine’. It has been further quoted that one who regularly follows proper diet and lifestyle does not require any medicine. On the other hand, for one who never follows the right diet and routine, even medicines are useless.

Although holistic in approach, Ayurveda prescribes highly individual specific recommendation on diet, lifestyle and medication, based on individual’s unique dosha prakriti (physical and mental constitution), season, age, time, strength, digestive fire, etc.

A proper diet on a regular basis helps to maintain a state of normalcy for the individual dosha viz. Vata, Pitta and Kapha and a dynamic equilibrium among the three, which according to the science of Ayurveda is the essence of good health.

Hence, the very concept of ‘wellness’, defined as ‘a dynamic state of health in which an individual progresses toward a higher level of functioning, achieving an optimum balance between internal and external environments’, clearly correlates to the first objective of Ayurveda of ‘maintaining good health’.

Moreover, to ensure proper health, Ayurveda signifies ‘digestion’ as the most vital internal factor. It’s only through good digestion that an individual can properly utilize the consumed diet for nourishment and overall health. Interestingly, it’s again the proper food or diet that sets the right kind of digestive process in motion.

Beauty or the optimum healthy state of skin is very much a part of wellness and is in fact the outside indicator of your internal heath. Since skin is the ‘you’ that you show to the world, it ultimately forms the major part your personality to communicate with the rest of the world. Thus, health is incomplete without a healthy, beautiful skin.

To summarize, food or diet is the most essential mean to ensure right digestion which in turn becomes the most significant measure to establish sound health and a beautiful skin. Thus, a sound digestive state is the internal indicator, while beauty is the external indicator, of your overall health and wellness.