The Hot Belly Diet, a 30-day Ayurvedic Plan to Reset Your Metabolism, Lose Weight, and Restore Your Body’s Natural Balance to Heal Itself. / Suhas G. Kshirsagar, 2014. Atria Books. 289 pages.
Part 4 of a series of posts on carbohydrates and diet.
Dr. Kshirsagar’s clinical experience has shown that Ayurvedic principles can successfully manage weight and increase a positive outlook. By managing the three food groups, proteins, fats and carbohydrates, his program promises to bring about perfect digestion. Dr. Kshirsagar maintains that without excellent digestion, the body resolves its needs by creating cravings, a cause of uncontrolled weight gain. Digestion is an all-or-nothing process. With incomplete digestion, the fats, proteins, and carbohydrates we have taken in get stuck in our gut. Then, rather than feeding our bodily systems and maintaining health, the food stagnates, becoming excess body weight, which easily prohibits organs from functioning correctly. Dr. Kshirsagar calls this condition a prevalence of ama, or built-up sludge in the body. This material is the result of partial digestion and is compounded by emotions that are also stuck.
Kshirsagar’s explanation of why carbohydrates are an extremely important food group not to be missed out on, is instructive. His 7 reasons to ensure that your diet plan includes this important group are energy, memory, loss of overall weight, loss of belly fat, heart protection, disease prevention, and satiety. Considering this head to toe list of benefits, carbohydrates should have a much better reputation than they currently do.
The author describes the glycemic index of foods as a balancing act: foods with high glycemic index can be tempered to result in a low glycemic index for the whole meal if they’re accompanied by the right amounts of “… fiber, healthy fat and protein…”, page 67. This is due to the complex nature of each food group.
During his 21-day Hot Belly Diet, Dr. Kshirsagar suggests that you do not eat squash, corn, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams, parsnips, beets, or turnips. But you can have all the low GI vegetables such as cauliflower, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, carrots, artichokes, asparagus, onions, mushrooms, celery, etc., and all the leafy greens such as lettuce, spinach, kale, collard greens, arugula, turnip greens, leeks, parsley.
The idea is that starchy vegetables may require clever manipulation of other nutrients in order to sustain the weight loss program he recommends. It would be easier and more successful to follow the line of least resistance for the digestive system and leave them out of the weight-reducing phase of his program.
Although I’ve never tried an Ayurvedic approach, I can sense that it has great value, mainly because of it’s an ancient practice. Of the books on diet and controlling weight I’ve seen thus far, very few consider the whole person with the objective of revitalizing both the body and soul. It’s the enlightened outlook of very few authors. But in the Hot Belly Diet, all aspects of a person’s life are discussed. You get a sense that for Dr. Kshirsagar, a person’s need for sustenance is only partly satisfied with food. If there’s mindful cooperation of both body and soul together, long-lasting health is the result.
Details from two more approaches to carbohydrates in these posts:
Deanna Minich, PhD’s Full-Spectrum plan
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