you are what you eat

as the saying goes— you are what you eat. but what does that mean and how does that happen? how does our full plate of dinner transform into the building materials that we use to heal and nourish our bodies daily? in ayurveda, there are a handful of theories to explain how we become what we consume— for the purposes of this blog post, we’ll focus on one: the irrigation theory. before we can fully dive into that, let’s back track a bit to understand the picture of what our digestion is from this eastern perspective.

agni

ayurveda uses qualitative understanding of the world around us as a framework to perceive our imbalances and simplify our solutions. building on a basic understanding of the five main elements (earth, water, fire, air, ether), we can begin to categorize concepts, such as bodily functions. as it pertains to our digestion, ayurveda refers to our digestive fire as agni. the qualities of fire are the same qualities that we see in our body as we digest that which we consume: related to energy and light. there is a transformative power in fire that we can also see in the transformation of the food stuffs we consume. so what does this transformation process look like?

irrigation theory

one theory of digestion is the irrigation theory. our food stuffs hits our agni (or digestive fire) and, much like a train route, makes stops at 7 stations (our tissues) letting passengers off at each stop til it hits the final destination and all remaining passengers hop off.

the nutritive path runs along the most prevalent to least/most subtle tissues in the body so think: rasa (lymph), rakta (red blood), mamsa (muscle), meda (fat), asthi (bone), majja (nerves), shukra (reproductive tissues). each tissue takes about 5 days to assimilate the nutrients it needs before the next tissue gets it’s pickins. this process lasts about 35 days (give or take).

what does this mean

in a world full of instant gratification, having a framework that offers some form of timeline to keep in mind is extremely useful. when you make dietary or lifestyle changes, it’s hard to maintain patience with the process after a few weeks with hard-to-notice shifts.

the value of this theory of metabolism offers us a timestamp to check back to see how things really have changed. circling back to the elemental understanding of the universe, when we experience what appears to be a hot imbalance (rashes, headache, bleeding), giving a cold quality intervention the proper time to take effect is vitally important to keeping consistency.

TL;DR— the real saying goes “you are what you eat and assimilate”, so eat for how you feel and continue to dial into your intiutions.