If you have been recommended to control your Vata, then the most fruitful way to attain this is by following Vata pacifying diet.
A Vata Pacifying diet will help you balance out the aggravated Vata Dosha.
Aggravated Vata can interfere with your health and cause issues like bloating, cough, flaky skin, constipation, and low blood pressure.
A Vata dosha diet consists of freshly cooked foods that have a soft mushy texture. They work by lubricating, nourishing the tissues, and maintain warmth.
Down below, we have explained in depth about Vata Dosha Pacifying diet and food, follow them to balance your dosha successfully.
Table of Contents
What Will A Vata Pacifying Diet Do?
A Vata pacifying diet aims to balance the Vata Dosha.
In most of the cases, Vata aggravates because of the obstruction to its flow by Pitta or Kapha Dosha. A Vata meal plan removes the obstruction and balances out the dosha.
The Vata pacifying diet encompasses freshly, cooked foods that have a soft texture. These foods are generally rich in protein and fat and also contain a variety of spices.
Such foods calm down the Vata by lubricating, nourishing, and retaining the moisture of the tissues and vessels.
Not only this, the Vata pacifying food also support digestion and elimination of digestive issues.
Principles Of Vata Pacifying Diet
In a Vata diet, the food choices are extremely crucial. You should be careful about your food choices. Whenever choosing a food to be careful that it should follow the Vata diet principles.
The diet won’t necessarily aim at do’s and don’t but would consist of principles that you should look for when choosing a food.
The Vata diet principles are as follows:
1. Eating At Regular Intervals In Small Portions
For sticking to the principles of Vata diet, you need practice. The first thing here would be looking at the time when you eat and the size of what you eat.
Include moderate quantity and practice eating at regular intervals. Instead of going for a three huge meal go for five small meals. Add a short snack time in between your regular meals.
Additionally, take food that comes under the Vata pacifying diet. Later in paragraphs, you will find the principles of diet that will help you choose your food.
You will take some time to adjust to such habits. But if you continue with this diet, eventually you will feel healthy and enjoyable.
2. Go For Warm Food Over Cold Food
Here the warm food includes the food which is warm at temperature and energetically warming too. You can even add digestive spices generously to further warm the texture of your food.
Make sure you completely avoid or minimize the foods that have a cooling energetic effect on your body. Food in this list is refrigerated leftover food items, frozen foods, carbonated drinks, and huge quantities of fruits and vegetable.
However, a leftover refrigerated homemade dish is always better than canned bean soup.
3. Go For Moist And Oily Food
You will increase your vata dryness if you eat too much dry or raw food. Prefer garnishing or cooking your food with a good amount of high-quality oils or clarified butter (ghee).
Moreover, drink plenty of fluids when on a vata dosha diet.
You can go for warm or cold water, but no cooler than room temperature.
In addition to ghee and oils, other moist foods are berries, melons, squash, zucchini, and greek yogurt. Add a generous quantity of water to keep your stews and soups well hydrated.
Other oily foods include avocado, olives, coconut, buttermilk, cheese, eggs, milk, wheat, nuts, and different variety of seeds.
Thus, minimizing the intake of extremely dry foods like chips, popcorns, white potatoes, crackers, etc is the key to balance Vata.
4. Grind And Nourish Your Food
The heavy food can interrupt the Vata dosha’s digestion. Thus, it’s always better to ground the food items to maintain the Vata’s lightness.
Moreover, grounding them stabilizes the energy and provide deep nourishment to your body.
These foods taste sweet. A few examples of such diet is cooked grain, root vegetable, stewed fruits, nuts, spiced milk, and seeds.
Sometimes, the processed packed food, readymade meals, and canned food are grounded but have a heavy texture due to the presence of chemical preservatives in it.
In addition to it, make sure reduce the consumption of caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol as much as you can. It is because they reduce the Vata’s requirement of grounded stability.
5. Prefer Smooth Food Over Rough
Raw vegetables and fruits are considered rough as they contain lots of fiber which gives it a rough texture. Because of this, the Vata dosha resists large quantities of raw vegetables and fruits.
However, the Vata pacifying diet does not totally resist it but ask you to have them in moderate quantities.
In the Vata dosha treatment, it’s not only the raw but over-consumption of cooked vegetable like cabbage, cauliflower, broccoli, beans, and other green vegetables is also prohibited.
You can always go for moderate amounts and make sure you add a good amount of ghee, oil, or butter to avoid the rough texture.
The food that falls in the smooth category are bananas, hot cereal, rice pudding, hot milk, pureed food, soups, root vegetables, etc.
6. Tastes You Should Go For
Your Vata Dosha is pacified by taking sweet, salty, and sour food. The Vata meal plan should have this kind of taste to balance out your Vata quickly.
i) Sweet Food:
Go for natural sweeteners over artificial sweeteners. You can get the natural sweetness from fruits, milk, fresh yogurt, nuts, seeds, lean meat, and ghee.
The sweet taste is the basic pillar of your Vata dosha diet plan. It is the prime source to provide your Vata the required nutrition.
Here, consuming sweet taste does not ask you to eat sweets in a large amount. Neither, we are asking you to go for food items made from refined sugar. Instead, consume the sweet taste from the natural sources.
Make sure that naturally, sweet food tends to be grounded, nourished, and satisfying to your tummy.
ii) Sour
Consume sour food in your Vata dosha treatment plan.
You can attain this by adding a dash of lemon, a splash of vinegar, saurekraut, cheese, or by a teaspoon of cream.
Nature has given us a lot of sour variety like green grapes, oranges, grapefruit, pineapple. You can have them in moderate amounts.
The sour taste is not meant to be the prime ingredient of a vata pacifying diet but it should complement other flavors.
With a sour taste, you can awaken your mind, senses, enhance your digestion, promotes energy, and help to eliminate the excess amount of air in your body that causes gas and bloating.
iii) Salty
The only source of salty taste is salt itself. The flavoring salts are used in enormous amounts in western culture. These does not have the same quality as the natural salts.
So, for a Vata pacifying diet consider sea salt or natural mineral salt over common table salt or flavoring salts.
If you opt for salty food it will stimulate your appetite, digestion, help your body to retain moisture, and also enhance the flavors of your food.
7. Tastes You Should Minimize Or Avoid
Now, let’s move on to the taste that you should avoid. In a Vata meal plan, pungent, bitter, and astringent tastes are not recommended.
It is because they tend to aggravate your Vata Dosha. The food that has this kind of tastes are described below in detail.
i) Pungent
This is a spicy hot flavor that you can find in chilies, radish, raw onions, turnips, or any other hat spices.
Nevertheless, having these spices in moderation is always good for a Vata-pacifying diet.
The reason behind it is that the pungent taste is dry and hot. Too much of dryness to your digestive system will increment the roughness and thus disturb the Vata dosha
ii) Bitter
The bitter taste predominates bitter greens (like kale, dandelion greens, and collard greens), and is also found in foods like bitter melon, Jerusalem artichokes, burdock root, eggplant, and chocolate.
The bitter taste is cooling, rough, drying, light, and generally reducing or catabolic—all qualities that tend to aggravate Vata.
ii) Astringent
The astringent taste is a dry flavor with a chalky taste.
It will dry up your mouth, give you roughness, make your body cold and heavy and thus interfere with the Vata Dosha.
The food that falls under this category are legumes, beans, black beans, chickpeas, soybeans, and any other form of beans.
You can also found this taste in a few fruits and vegetables like apple, cranberries, pomegranate, black plum, cauliflower, lettuce, rice cakes, broccoli, bitter gourd etc.
8. Manner Of Eating
For a Vata pacifying diet, it is extremely important to check how you eat food.
Vata dosha is calmed when you eat in a peaceful serene environment. It is because your full attention is on the food which gives immense nourishment to your body.
Additionally, your meals should be on time i.e. try to have your food at the same time daily. It helps the body clock to aid in digestion.
So, sit in a peaceful place visualize how your food is giving your energy, nourishing your body, and keeping you healthy.
This habit in a long run is good to balance the Vata Dosha.
You can also focus on your chewing ability while eating to further visualize the magic of food on your body.
Finally, when following a Vata dosha treatment makes sure you avoid fasting.
It is because it will slow down your digestion rate. However, you can always go for light foods if you feel heavy and you want to cleanse your system.
Now, you know the principles of a Vata pacifying diet. So, let’s move on to, few meal options that you can go for.
Vata Dosha Diet Plan
Down below, is a list of Vata meal plan. We are jotting it down to help you give options for the Vata food.
We will give you multiple options for breakfast, dinner, and lunch, you can choose any of them.
1. Vata Breakfast
This is a very important meal of your day as your Vata is elevated during this time. You have to nourish your Vata this time as it was fasting overnight.
A healthy breakfast will stabilize your system and give your energy for the entire day.
A few healthy options for breakfast for Vata meal plan are as follows:
- Eggs: You can boil them, poach them, or fry them. Prefer having eggs with a buttered toast. Additionally, you can even add a few stir-fried veggies or fresh fruits along with it.
- Cereals: In this category comes oatmeal, porridge, puffed rice, and organic muesli. Cook your cereal in milk as milk is grounding and when hot is preferred for Vata dosha.
- Semolina Pudding: Make a semolina pudding with milk. Garnish it with few nuts and seeds.
- Shakes: Soak dates, almonds, prunes, or any other soft nut of your choice. Blend it with a glass of milk and add a dash of nutmeg or cinnamon spice.
- Seeds: Opt for flax seeds, basil seeds, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, and pumpkin seeds. Try to sprinkle a bit of seed to any of your breakfast meal. These are compulsory and you have to add them to any of your breakfast choices.
Vata Lunch
This is the big meal of the day. It should be generous in quantity and quality.
Your lunch should be nourishing and be grounding at the same time to balance down your Vata Dosha.
A few good options for the same are:
- Sauteed vegetable with lentils and served with tortillas, rice, whole grain noodles, or with Indian Roti.
- Soups or stews with vegetables
- Kitchari with a dash of butter and few cucumbers.
- Any lentil-like urad dal, moong dal with rice or India roti, or tortillas.
- Rice pasts with olive, cheese, beetroot, and a bit of oil.
Vata Dinner
Your dinner should be small. You should have your dinner two hours before you go to bed. It’s small because your digestive system won’t get enough time to digest it.
You can go for any of the lunch options but in smaller size during your dinner.
However, a few excellent options for dinner for a Vata dosha treatment plan are as follows:
- A bowl of rasam
- A bowl of Caesar salad with no artificial dressings. However, you can prepare a dressing with honey and olive oil for the same.
- Vegetable or chicken soup. Prepare it at home don’t go for the packed ones.
- Stir-fry vegetables with a small roti or tortilla.
Final Talk
The Vata pacifying diet is an easy way to balance your Vata dosha and eliminate the health issues due to their aggravation or depletion.
Following a specific diet won’t do wonders in a day but, a regular intake will surely give your beneficial results.
You can also follow a Vata dosha pacifying daily routine along with the diet.
You can choose any food or dish of your choice for your Vata diet but, make sure it falls under the principles of Vata diet.
To help you out we will be further giving a list of Vata Pacified foods that you can consume to correct the imbalance of the dosha.
