Weekend Edition: Cool Your Summer From the Inside Out

Vegetable and Red Lentil Summer Soup Recipe

With summer almost here the need for lighter, cooler foods is on the rise. Asturian summers aren’t known for their heat, but it still gets warm and that little heat and the high humidity makes everything feel heavier.

Over the past few years, with my metabolism not what it once was—we’re not in our 20s anymore, Toto—I have noticed that the warmer it gets outside the slower my body is at digesting the food I eat. Not that it’s necessarily a bad thing, but because of it, I have learned that I need to incorporate not only lighter foods into my diet but also cooling foods.

From an Ayurvedic point of view, we have now entered into the Pitta time of year in the Northern Hemisphere. This is the time of year of transformation, heat, fire and water. And as a person whose constitution lies heavily in Pitta already, it’s easy for my body to get over heated and overwhelmed. Which not only leads to my metabolism shutting down, but also affects my moods and mental health.

I have found that one simple way to help reduce that heat is through the food that I eat. If I eat heavy foods or overly spicy foods, this exacerbates the issue. But if I eat cooler, lighter foods, I feel so much better physically, mentally and emotionally.

In Ayurveda and Yoga, there is a practice called pratipaksha bhavana, or comparison of opposites, where we see how like increases like. In science we might look at it as a positive feedback loop, when an initial stimulus causes an effect that reinforces or amplifies that stimulus. In terms of our brain function, we see how the more we stimulate certain neurons together, the more likely those patterns are to wire together. “What fires together, wires together” as the Hebbian theory states.

The point from pratipaksha bhavana is that while like may increase like, opposites can help balance us. In terms of regulating the nervous system, in Yoga Therapy we might look at a person who is overly heated, pushing themselves to the limit, anxious and burning out, and suggest practices that calm, cool and soothe. From an Ayurvedic nutrition point of view, we’d use foods that were cooling and light to help balance the system.

The following recipe is one that I started making a few weeks ago as a way to help cool, calm and balance the system. While also being nutritious and incredibly tasty—because, let’s be honest, life is too short to not eat food yummy foods, and just because something is nutritious doesn’t mean it can’t taste good. Plus, the recipe is super easy to make and other than chopping vegetables, takes very little effort. A huge bonus during busy summer months!