Counting calories is over and one-size-fits-all nutrition has been debunked. It is within the exploration of what works for you, as an individual where all the fun is to be had. Understanding your personal Prakriti, or constitution according to Ayurveda opens the door to your own personal guide to what to eat to thrive. Once you have an understanding of what your body is actually craving at a core level, you can fill your own grid with a plethora of wonderful foods.

Once you have your foundation, the rest just falls into place.

Here are 16 rudimentary pieces to play with as you build up the foundation to optimal health.

1. Rainbow Foods

Eating the full-colour spectrum is rudimentary. This just may be Mother Natures little clue to complete nutrition. Each colour expresses a unique nutritional profile. Play with your palate and eat like an artist.

2. Alkaline Foods

No disease can exist in an alkaline environment. Get a grasp of what the acid/alkaline balance looks like in your diet, and then make it more alkaline.

3. Fermented Foods and Probiotics

It is now wildly understood that poor gut health and undigested food is the root cause of almost all body imbalances, including BRAIN health. Unless or until the quality of your lifestyle and diet is top-notch, strengthening the digestive system through the use of probiotics and or fermented foods is paramount.

4. Superfoods + Functional Foods

For the highest nutrition yield possible. Why mess around? Go for gold.

5. Raw Foods

Heating food, especially plants: destroys their life-giving enzymes. Get to know how “raw” you should be depending on your own personal constitution and goals. Somewhere in between 100% and one cold- pressed vegetable juice a day.

6. Fasting

Gandhi, Buddha, Jesus and Moses did it. Maybe they knew something. When we allow the body to break form digestion, the body slows its IGF-1 production and rejuvenates cells instead.

7. Quantity Reduction

Fasting: We eat too much. We eat way too much. When we take off some of the pressure from the digestive system, it provides redistribute energy for cellular regeneration and repair. 80% full is enough.

8. Conscious Eating

Your body is paying attention and your gut is listening. How, when, and where you eat: not just what.

9. Good fats keep you agile and smart

Lubricate your tissues and your mind with plenty of good-disease-fighting fats because we are Omega 3 deficient and Omega 6 and 9 overloaded.

10. Let them Drink Wine

Moderate consumption of resveratrol-rich red wine can be good for humanity on many levels. Social and celebratory red wine drinking has been linked to the longest living and healthiest communities in the world.

11. Secondary Nutrition

If diet is defined by anything you take in from any field of perception, then use all your senses to feed yourself. Your food is only 1/5th of your diet. You are what you eat, see, hear, feel and think.

12. The Belief System

This may be one of our strongest dietary influences. So let’s not demonise, victimise, or self-chastises our food choices: all bad for your health.

13. Supplementation

We need it, we got em, let’s do it.

14. Plant-Based or Plant-Fed

If you thrive most as a non-vegetarian then commit to grass-fed and pasture-raised meat. Grain-fed beef is high in Omega 6 fats, which are pro-inflammatory and damaging to the brain. When choosing fish, keep in mind we are already “peak-fish”. Wild-caught and sustainably fished is the best choice.

15. Sugar is Inflammatory

Sugar addiction is no small thing. Everything became sweeter and sweeter and our need to satiate through sugar became stronger and stronger. Detoxification of the body is the most effective way to reverse this biological addiction.

16. Source

Above all, I emphatically support eating local, sustainable and truly organic as much as humanly possible

To Sum Up …

We were doing well and then went way, way off track. So we learn from our mistakes, pick up the low-fat pieces and move on. The only way we can go forward in the field of nutrition is by going backwards, back to simple wholesome real food.

It’s about finding what works for you both psychologically and physiologically: monitoring it and celebrating it. The continual experimentation for your own personal THRIVING formula is truly the way forward.