Why Your Body Already Knows How to Heal with Nidhi Bhanshali Pandya

For listeners who are brand new to Ayurveda, explain what it is in simple terms.

A lot of people may have heard Ayurveda in the context of things like turmeric, turmeric shots, ashwagandha, oil pulling, dry brushing, bullet coffee, tongue scraping. These are all practices that come from this particular science of life called Ayurveda, which literally translates into ayu. Ayurveda means life and Veda means science. It is also the sister science of yoga because they both come from the same place. Broadly understood as an ancient healing system that comes from India.

How does someone get to know what their rhythm is so they can better heal themselves?

I first start with hope, right? Because why should you believe me when I tell you that you have the power to come back into your own rhythms when everybody else out there on the internet is is telling you otherwise. So the reason why I say this first is because I want to remind everybody that if species that we consider less intelligent than us know, understand their rhythms, we have a way of knowing. We're just very disconnected. We've modernized ourselves so much. Now, I'm not suggesting you go and you live in a village, but at the same time, you just want to stay— you start, right? You start with just being in tune with the rhythms of the universe. Just Start with day and night and honor those rhythms.

Thank you for tuning in to the Amberly Lago Show, and today I'm so excited to welcome Nidhi Bansalipandya. Did I say that right? Okay, I've been practicing. It's such a beautiful name. I'm so excited that you're here. She is an Ayurveda Vedic doctor, educator, speaker, bestselling author known affectionately on social media as My Ayurvedic life. Um, she brings the ancient wisdom and, and science of Ayurveda, which literally means the science of life, into real modern day life in, in ways that are practical, relatable, and deeply transformative. And this is a topic I've actually never discussed on the show. And so I am super excited to dive in and talk about real healing. Talk about your new book, and just I'm obsessed with you on Instagram and been following you there, and all the little tricks and tips and stuff you have from everything from feeling better, curing your headache by touching your nose, like so many things. So welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Amberly. Thank you for having me.

Yeah, well, I'm excited, and I was like, I'm gonna be in New York. It'd be so cool. to see you. I don't know if we could make that happen, but you're in New York. How long have you been in New York?

I've been on the East Coast here, like around here for the last 20 years, but in the city, in Manhattan for the last 7.

Oh, wow. I love the city.

Yeah, honestly. I mean, you can never be bored. You can never have a dull moment. You can have more adventure than you signed up for, but you can't have a dull moment.

Yeah, for sure. Just the energy. You just feel the energy of the city. It's exciting. I wanted my youngest daughter to go with me. And she's a Texas girl through and through. And she's like, Mom, no, I've already been to New York with you once. There's no grass. There's no grass. And I'm like, well, there's Central Park. But I wanted to get into your journey a little bit. Where did you grow up?

So Amberly, I grew up in Mumbai, which is kind of the New York of India. So very busy city. It's like the finance capital. It's where Bollywood, where all the movies happen.

Really?

And right there in the heart of Mumbai, I grew up in what's called a traditional joint family. So in spite of all the busyness and the urban experience that Mumbai brings, I still grew up in a family with pretty solid and grounded traditions, including Ayurveda, because my grandfather was an Ayurvedic healer.

Wow.

So I have thoroughly enjoyed actually being able to understand that how do you live in this grounded manner? In a way, big cities are known to cause disease, but because I grew up in a big city in a family that believed in healing, I got to learn healing as a value system to practice on the go. How do you live in a big city, deal with all the madness, and still be able to heal yourself? But that's why, that's where I grew up, and there was 14 members in my family.

Wow.

So you can imagine how crazy that was, but it And honestly, because, because of Ayurveda, it never felt as crazy. Wow.

Well, you know, it's my dream to go to India. Um, I have, uh, part of my team works over there and Preetha. So it's a family, 2 daughters and a husband and wife. And they've worked with me now for 6 years and we've been trying and trying and trying to get her a visa to come over here so she can stay with me. And it's kind of hard. And so we haven't been able to do that. So now I'm like, well, maybe I will just come see you. It's my dream.

That'd be so lovely.

To go to India. Yeah, I just, it's my dream. So I'm all, I'm really interested in the culture and what kind of things did your grandfather teach you growing up?

Yeah, so, you know, Amberly, I mean, we lived in a large family. So 7 children and 7 adults, 14 members of the family. Right? And for 14 people to live in the same house, have their unique interests. My father, while my grandfather was an Ayurvedic healer, my own father was a banker. So he was a professional, and then you have this healing. So it was really an amalgamation of like spirituality and finance and education and academia and health and wellness. It was a very rich background, but at the same time, there's 14 people who need to get along. and who need to keep harmony because without harmony, there's no learning. They're only in survival. And I would say that in my family, I believe there were great systems that were in place, not rigid, nothing was rigid, nothing was imposed, but even simple rhythms. You know, my grandfather, who was a practitioner of Ayurveda, really believed that as long as you live in the rhythms of the universe, of the day, of day and night, of how you eat, how you go through season by season, how you are attuned to your own bio-individuality, As long as you are following those tunes, those clues that are given to you by nature outside and within your body, you can live in great harmony. And I have to tell you, Amberly, with such little effort, right? We all live like that. So I just wanna give you a simple example that, for example, my grandfather, instead of teaching us like, this is how you eat in the day and this is what you do at night, There were simple things that were just woven into our day. Things like, oh, do you wanna, are you sure you wanna eat, for example, cheese for dinner? That would digest better for lunch. Now, as a young girl, you're learning so many things. You're learning that, oh, maybe human beings don't digest as well at night. Oh, maybe I digest better at lunch, and maybe cheese is heavy, and thus it's being offered to me. So here you're learning about little things, or when seasons change, the dialogue at home changed. There were practices, there were festivals, celebrations, Magh, You know, every season change. So you marked everything. You marked the beginning of the evening, you marked the beginning of adolescence, you marked the beginning of a season, and you marked it in the most, with rituals and not regimens, not routines. And rituals are great, right? Because, and they were not even overly ritualistic, but they were like these, just like you pause to observe there's a shift in something, and that pause makes you very present. You know, it's not a task. It's not like, oh my God, winter's here, we gotta do this. No. But when you pause, you celebrate, you notice, and you become really present, you stop questioning and it stops being a task. And—

I love the power of the pause. And you won't believe this, but I have, I don't have any tattoos and I've thought of getting a tattoo, just a pause button on my arm to Remind me to pause and be present. And I love that you say ritual. It sounds so much better than routine, doesn't it?

Oh my God, it's just, it's entirely different. Ritual is an experience. Routine is a task. Routine is something you need to get checked off a box and you don't become present for. It keeps you on the go. Ritual helps you to stay in the being mode, in the, you know, your being. You have to be in the being mode to actually be with a ritual. I am such a big fan of rituals versus routine.

Me too. And you talk about being in the rhythm. How does somebody that is so out of touch with their body, for example, I'll never forget there when I used to be in the fitness industry for so, for 26 years, I trained clients in the fitness industry and everyone from bodybuilders, um, cops to stay-at-home moms to big executives. And I could see just how out of touch some people were with their body, like they could not even activate a certain muscle, uh, because they had not done that sort of exercise and have just been so out of touch with their body. What would you say to someone who is very out of touch with their body, their soul, you know, everything? Um, yeah, because they're just been so in the grind or just on autopilot. How does someone get to know what their rhythm is so they can better heal themselves?

Absolutely. And so, Amberly, the first thing that I'd like to say to that is that I'm actually appalled by the world today that we actually believe that it's, that our own rhythm is a secret to us that can only be given to us by an expert. We actually have started believing that. We are like, oh, if it's easy, it must be wrong. If it's bringing ease, it has to be hard. It has to feel like swimming against the tide, none of which is true. So I'm sincerely appalled. And the hope that I first, I first start with hope, right? Why should you believe me when I tell you that you have the power to come back into your own rhythms when everybody else out there on the internet is telling you otherwise? So the hope is this, right? Every single species on the planet knows what their rhythms are. They know how to live. For example, a deer never needs to be told that it's diurnal. It wakes up in the morning. It goes to the same patch of grass to graze. It's an herbivore. Never had to consult anybody to know it. Doesn't have to set an alarm, and it doesn't feel like discipline. When the rooster does his cock-a-doodle-doo, same here. Tigers don't get carried away because there's a new study about 5:00 AM waking and doing yoga. And bears know when to hibernate, and groundhog is tuned to the cycle of the sun and knows it's the first day of fall, right? So you basically, every species, even worms, little worms know how to live, and they also know how to heal, right? Animals know.

Yeah.

When they're nursing, what to eat, when they're bruised, when to roll in sulfur-rich soil. So the reason why I say this first is because I wanna remind everybody that if species that we consider less intelligent than us know, understand their rhythms, we have a way of knowing. We're just very disconnected. We've modernized ourselves so much. Now, I'm not suggesting you go and you live in a village. I mean, I grew up in Mumbai, I live in New York, so it doesn't, there's no village here. But at the same time, You just wanna stay, you start, right? You start with just being in tune with the rhythms of the universe. Just start with day and night and honor those rhythms, even observing behavior of other animals. And if you're living in a big city like me, even if it means National Geographic, but to really, like I divide, you know, Ayurveda divides the day in 6 parts, and I tell people to get really tuned into those 6 parts, just in awe and wonder of what's happening in those 6 parts of the day, and to start noticing the shifts in your body.

Yeah.

That's a great starting point. Even if you set that one rhythm on, you'll notice that all the other rhythms start to adjust, whether it's your digestion, your hormones, your energy levels, et cetera. But it has to start somewhere, and this is one of the greatest rhythms to start with. Once you've attuned yourself to that rhythm, then I say, let's go to seasonal rhythms. And it can never happen without keen awareness. And you— while people are very scared to be present in their body and notice changes, It's safer to start noticing what's happening outside, how animals are shifting their behavior, how trees are changing their color, how dry or not dry the earth around you is getting, how the fruits are changing in their nature. And it's very subconscious learning. The connecting of the dots happens at a very subconscious level, just how we all know. We never actively think, oh, if it's cold, we just shrug. We know it, our body knows it. But when you make these connections and you learn through awe and wonder and not through information, It's an experience. It's built into your cellular memory. It's a cellular intelligence. And then you don't have a choice but to, you automatically start going back into those rhythms like our ancestors did. Of course, there are many, many things that people can do that like, because Amberly, you asked me what was the starting point, I'll say start here.

You say what?

I'd say, because if you ask me what's the starting point, I'd say start here. And then of course, there are so many other places that you can go to from here, but this is a great place for people to start. living in rhythm of some sort.

Yeah. And you know what has actually helped me be that way? Because there was a time when I was like, oh my goodness, I'm on Zoom all day long, or I'm online all day long. And something that's really helped me get in tune with the rhythm and even get outside is having a dog. And my cute little dog Nugget, You know, she's got to go for walks. And I've just noticed like every morning getting out and seeing the sunrise, every night going for a walk, seeing the sunset, but just getting outside. Do you find it hard living in a big city where there's not— I love nature. I love grass. And I was just saying, my daughter didn't want to go to New York with me because she's like, mom, there's no grass. What do you do living in a big city? to feel connected. Do you feel a disconnect when you're in this big city? Because I feel like I need to get out and just walk in the grass, or I really, I didn't realize how much I was going to miss the mountains. I lived in LA for 31 years and I missed the mountains so much. It's been, that's been hard. What do you do in a big city?

So Amberly, I'm not going to lie and say that, oh, it's very easy. It's not. You need to go out of your way and you need to plan time in nature. It's not happening. It's not that if I'm going from my place to the grocery store, I meet some trees on the way. Nah, nah, that's not going to happen. So, when you're living in a big city like I do, you have to build it into your week. You have to say, I'm going to take time out. I'm going to go to Central Park for a walk. I'm going to go and stare at the river. I live close to the East River. Schedule Every break that I take, it's never to a city. Of course, I never travel to a city. Every time I go on vacation, I go upstate New York, or I go abroad. It's always gonna be in the mountains or near the ocean. So, I have to absolutely plan. Now, that does not mean that during a day, like in my day-to-day, I don't end up getting time. So, I'll make sure, like for example, where I live, my windows are big. There's always sunlight coming, not nature, but it's something. My apartment is full of plants. And of course, it's not like being out there with soil in the right way, but it's something. But more than anything, I think the way you bring peace and pause into city life is scheduling less. So I'm very, very mindful of how much I book myself out because it's very easy living in New York City. You could be out all the time.

Mm-hmm.

But self-care, you have to double down on self-care. You have to overcompensate for what nature is not giving you. not giving you. And that overcompensation happens, yes, through planning self-care time, through meeting people, community that feels safe. Because the advantage of being in nature is this, right? That trees are still, they still have a coherent electromagnetic field. They're not watching social media. They're not anxious. I mean, trees also can be anxious, but it's different, right? If you're out there in the nature, the electromagnetic field, the energy, the vibrations are so They're contagious and they're so high. There's so much coherence there that you automatically come to heart coherence yourself. And that's not possible in a big city unless you're actively spending time, whether it's going for sound baths, whether it's meeting like-minded community, whether it's spending time. So you have to take time out. It is possible, Amberly. I can say that most of the time, even though I live in New York City, I feel balanced emotionally and physically, but it takes more of an effort. It is working against the tide, but it's possible.

Well, thank you. That's such a good reminder for every single person listening and me. Like, I need that reminder. So I want to get down to kind of basics. For new listeners who are brand new to Ayurveda, explain what it is in simple terms.

Yeah. So a lot of people today may have heard of Ayurveda, and you may have heard Ayurveda in various contexts. For example—

First of all, wait, you say it so beautifully. I have She's saying it the correct way, y'all, just saying. But sorry, go ahead, go ahead. I didn't mean to cut you off.

Of course. No, not at all, Amberly. So a lot of people may have heard Ayurveda in the context of things like turmeric, turmeric shots, ashwagandha, oil pulling, dry brushing, bullet coffee, tongue scraping. These are all practices that come from this particular science of life called Ayurveda, which literally translates into— Ayu means life and Veda means science. It is also the sister science of Yoga because they both come from the same place. Broadly understood as an ancient healing system that comes from India, Ayurveda is very relevant today. Unfortunately, Ayurveda is taught wrong everywhere today.

Really?

Because I'll tell you, this is why it's taught wrong, right? Ayurveda has become just another wellness system, which is prescriptive. It has become prescriptive, dogmatic, and— but that's not how it's supposed to be. It's not supposed to be prescriptive, it's not supposed to be dogmatic, and it's not supposed to be rigid. Ayurveda really enumerates the principles of life, what keeps us alive. and understands the rhythms of the cycles of the universe and of our human body with such, in such depth and detail that once you understand those principles, you don't need the prescriptions. You can just keep applying them to everything in your life. So Ayurveda basically covers everything from childcare to fertility, to postpartum, to treatment and prevention of diseases. When I say diseases, I mean all kinds of diseases, to social conduct, to mental health, Through nervous system regulation. If it has to do with human life, Ayurveda has it covered. Ayurveda is designed for everybody on the planet. It's not just for Indians, and it's not meant to be prescriptive. Even if you don't do turmeric and ashwagandha, you can still practice Ayurveda. So I wanted to clarify this right here and— right here and now, that Ayurveda is for everybody, and it's not as dogmatic as it's made out to be. It's not as academic as it's made out to be. Ayurveda has also become known, Amberly, for its concept of bio-individuality. It introduced bio-individuality in a big way with the concept of doshas, that everybody can have a different unique body type and different patterns and tendencies in their own body type. And that's very important. It's a very important concept. And once you understand your body type and your function, how your body likes to function, it becomes much easier to keep yourself in balance.

Well, how do you figure out what body type you are? Give me some examples of that.

So, Amberly, it's deeper work. So mostly, firstly, people will take a quiz, almost always wrong. Okay, so if you've taken a dosha quiz, at first—

It's almost always wrong, but take the quiz.

I'm sorry to say this. I'm sorry to say this because, you know, Amberly, at first people feel great because they feel reassured. They're like, oh, I'm not weird. I'm like this because it's my body type, or I respond badly to gluten because of my body type, or I like to, you know, I wake up earlier than my sisters or my friends do because of my body type, or I put on more weight and I eat the same type of food because of my body type. So people, it feels very reassuring first, at first, but then it becomes a trap, right? But basically, mainly, there are 3 types of— there are the 3 distinct body types, and sometimes you'll see a combination. One is the person Who likes to build. The body is a building body, which means you'll eat a little, you'll build more tissue. Everything you may have, you feel a little slower in your body, you have bigger features, thicker hair, a bigger build. Everything is slower, everything is more stagnant. It's very easy for you to get sluggish. Your dominant emotion could be depression, like dominant difficult emotion, not regularly. Those are people who like comfort zones, but everything is slower and more like Oriented towards building. When they get sick, they can get big colds, or they can easily get into like high cholesterol, plaque in their arteries, obesity, basically the whole metabolic syndrome, right? Those are the builders. Then the second category are people who have high heat in their body. So they're very metabolic beings, transforming. Everything in their body likes to just metabolize and heat up and just They're hot. They're hot. They could be inflamed. They could have skin rashes. They could respond strongly to the sun. They could digest their food really, they could burn their food. They may have a bowel movement 2, 3 times a day. And they can be overly focused, little bit aggressive if they're not balanced. Those are the heat-led people who are just transforming all the time, very inflamed, very active, very angry, very agitated if they're not balanced. Understanding it allows you to balance it. And the third is depleted, depleted and dry. So the depleted and dry population are those that are just frail, have less energy. It's not the kind of drain that the first category has, which is, I'm just drained because I'm fatigued because my body feels heavy. This is a depletion from overactivity. This is a depletion from lack of energy, inherent energy. They could have drier skin, they could have more bloating, they could have anxiety. And then there's a way to understand these body types, right? So I usually help people. I've created a method called the Inner Climate Method, and I help people to understand their symptoms and then assign it to a climate, that your body's become hot and dry, or your body has become cold and stagnant, or the body has become dry and cool, you know, super dry and windy. Which means overnervous system is hyper, body is dry, bloating, et cetera. So I kind of help people to map it out instead of giving it a dosha name because it's jargon people cannot understand, to kind of come to this idea of that we can all have an altered inner climate. And just how, Amberly, if you were coming to New York, right, which you are like later this week, once you know what the climate in New York is, you know how to pack.

Mm-hmm.

Similarly, once we understand our inner climate, We know how to live. You know what to eat for it. You know how to wake up, sleep, exercise, everything for your inner climate.

Well, is that why some people like soups and spicy food or hot food, and some people like just bland kind of mashed potatoes?

That could be, but there are more reasons to that, right? Some people may have grown up with spice, so they like more spice. But yes, at a certain level, why some people feel more cold, why some people feel more hot, why some people eat the same amount of food but put on different, you know, their body responds differently, or we think that all foods just have calories and it'll respond the same way in everybody's bodies, but we see that's not true, right? So, there could be somebody who could have a very low caloric intake, but more tissue formation from it. So, basically, your body type, your inner climate, really dictates how you respond to the world around you and the food you eat.

Okay, that, I'm so interested in this. And, I mean, so many people think of wellness as, like, diets and quick fixes. How does this challenge that kind of mindset?

I'll tell you that the quick fix is actually very expensive and very long in the long term because it's like one quick fix and second quick fix and third quick fix and all that. You know, we're always quick fixing and nothing feels quick.

Mm-hmm.

And how many Band-Aids are you gonna live with, right? So what Ayurveda does, it understands the root cause of conditions and disease. For example, Amberly, I'm gonna give you an example to really bring this to life, right? So I'm gonna give you an example of one of the clients that I worked with at some point. point. So this is a woman, she was a top-notch lawyer in New York, okay? And she was burnt out, and she was exhausted, and she basically quit her work, her career, when she was around early 40s. And then she started looking for her second thing to do. But in the meantime, her doctor told her that, hey, why don't you go and practice some yoga, take some time off? Now, given her mentality, right? She's very intense, very fierce, burnt out. I want you to think of all those words. Fierce is so hot. The idea of fierce is like, it feels almost like a hot word. Intense almost feels like it has heat. Burnt out feels like it has heat. The choice of yoga she made was hot yoga.

Mm-hmm.

When she came to work with me, she had inflamed joints. Look at the word, in- Flamed joints, flame, right? She had high sensitivity to the sun. So every time she would go in the sun, she would get a rash, a sun rash, which is again hot, again felt very hot and dry, right?

Hmm.

Her mucus lining had been depleted. So she always had this really burning sensation in her gut. Her gut bacteria was always acting up, and she would just, she couldn't, she had zero tolerance for spice anymore. Now, she would've assumed, which she did at some point, that every one of her symptoms was different, right? She felt like her inflammation in her joints, the rheumatoid that she had, needed, you know, she needed to see a rheumatologist. She thought she needs to see a gastroenterologist for her digestive systems. And she was going to see a dermatologist for her skin allergy. She was gonna see an allergist dermatologist. And then she had her own, you know, her therapist that she worked with. When she came to me and I'm like, hey, you're hot and dry everywhere. And what you're doing is you're doing yoga, hot yoga, which is furthering your problem. And every time, because her nature was action-oriented, every time she found a problem, she's like, oh, what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? And she was so burnt out, again, hot and dry. So we worked together, right, to create, to bring, to dial back this heat that had taken everywhere in her body. So what does that look like? Firstly, we shifted her from doing mode to being mode. I made her do a lot less. I said less exercise, less social commitments, less alcohol, which is again dehydrating, less caffeine, right? We gave her some deep dread Deep breathwork and longer sleep hours. She was waking up at 5:00 AM in the morning because she was used to doing that from her career days. And we said, no, you're going to sleep and you're a woman. You need to sleep and you need to be more juicy. You need the moon energy to support you while you're asleep. And she already started feeling better. Then we added foods. We added certain cooling foods like more coconut, more rice broths, more certain types of dairy, what agreed with her body. and licorice tea, lavender essential oils, linen clothes, bathing in the moonlight, floral fragrances. We brought all of that on, right? Now, lo and behold, within about 3, 4 months, Amberly, her digestive systems were better. Her joints were less inflamed. Her digestive system was better. Her joints were less inflamed. She, you know, we were moving into the summer at that point. She felt that she started to tolerate the heat much better from the sun. She was feeling emotionally better. Her eyes, which used to be red and dry by the end of the day, now felt like they had more juice in them because she was limiting her screen time, and she was limiting this whole intensity that was fired up her nervous system. So she started healing from that, and every single system in her body, as her climate changed—

Wow.

Everything in her body started to restore itself.

Wow.

She felt like visibly, I mean, I still know her, I'm still working with her, even though I don't need to see her as often. I don't think she's on any type of medication right now.

That's amazing. Well, do you have a list anywhere of, or that people can know, or the quiz that they can take if they go to your website?

So, Amberly, we've tried to work with the quiz many times, right? And the way I've, the reason why I've moved away from it, because it's no more accurate than any other what they call dosha quiz out there, which is even less easy to understand. But the thing is, I like to map it out to individual symptoms. I do work with people in groups for them to understand, but I ask people to put their symptoms down, and how they're feeling in their mind, and how they're feeling in their body. And then I help them to assign qualities. Then I have something called a word association chart. And then, for example, if somebody puts acidity as a symptom, right? Like they're feeling acidity, acid reflux, Then, we have a word association chart, and I ask them to circle out what are the qualities of this acidity. Somebody can say slimy, somebody can say hot, and then we kind of add up the scores. But, it has to start with their symptoms because symptoms are so nuanced. Somebody could have a Bartholin cyst, which is not going to be anywhere on my quiz.

Yeah.

People have such specific, specific symptoms that may not make it on my quiz. So I actually made a different one.

It'd be hard, wouldn't it, to put all the symptoms in one quiz? I mean, I sometimes feel like I go to the doctor and I'm like going through pages of stuff to check off.

Yeah. This is not half as difficult, Amberly. Unfortunately, it requires a little bit of like, you know, personalized assistance, but it's so easy once you see it, Amberly. Like imagine even in this conversation, right? when you look at all her symptoms together, you can understand that everything is hot and dry in her body, from her skin rash to her burnout to her inflammation. Everything is heat blood intensity and fierceness and red eyes and dry throat and sore— everything. Body was parched inside, burning inside.

And it's amazing to me that, I mean, you can use food as medicine. What's one diet that Like, what's a dietary principle that has had the biggest impact on your wellbeing?

Yeah, I'll tell you the biggest impact on your wellbeing. I would say there are 2 things, Amberly. One is you want to recognize that once the sunset sets, human beings cannot digest food well. You just cannot in the evening time. Winter months, it's different because your digestive system is more active. It kind of has brown fat and more thermogenesis. But, on a normal day, most people cannot digest food after sunset because our ancestors, we're diurnal mammals. Before electricity, we just could— we never lit oil lamps in our house and had these big fat dinner parties 5 hours after sunset. We just didn't do it. So, we ate supper. So, the best thing you can do for yourself is do an early light dinner and a big fat lunch. Lunch is where you indulge. And when the sun is at its peak and plants have the guts to do photosynthesis, that's when your digestive system is at its highest. Science today is realizing that as well. Your insulin sensitivity is the highest. Your hunger hormone ghrelin is at a very sweet place. Everything in the body is geared up to digest better. Gastrin, which is your— one of your digestive enzymes, is doing really well. So big lunch. By the time we come to dinner, almost everybody is insulin resistant. We all have slight insulin resistance in our— we cannot break down starches and sugars. So, you don't want to be eating big then. That's the first principle. Just trying that for 3 weeks, life changer, game changer, everything changes. And, second one is cooking your foods as much as possible, eating warm cooked foods. If you look into the history of evolution of mankind, we actually became this species that we are today, 300,000 years ago, When we started to cook our foods because our gut bacteria changed. Cooking your foods, using good fats, using good spices, slight fermentation, all of that. But we always, that's what makes us human. So cook what you can, eat warm foods when you can.

That's it. What's your favorite food?

I have a very wide palate, Amberly. I eat a lot of different cuisines and different foods. I am primarily vegetarian. I like a lot of rice-based dishes, but that could be like a black bean bowl with rice and salsa and avocados, or it could be a fried rice with stir-fried veggies. It could be lentils and rice. So, I would say every day I include some form of rice. Being a vegetarian, that's my primary form of carbohydrate. And, it's not the conventional rice that people in America eat because the rice in all of these cultures, whether it's traditional Chinese medicine, if you look at East East Asia, or you look at India, rice is aged. It's always— it's so to lower down the glycemic index of rice, rice is harvested. It has a lot of moisture, a lot of what we call slime in it. It's always put in granaries and silos, and it's aged. And the process of aging rice lowers the glycemic index significantly. So, if you ever buy rice from an Indian grocery store, if you buy even basmati, you'll see that it has a little bit of a sign that says aged rice.

Oh.

So I eat always, always, I always eat a short grain aged variety, which is super light, very low in glycemic index. And then the other thing you wanna do if you're eating rice is, of course, either eat it with something that's slightly fermented, like a miso, like a kimchi, because that again lowers the glycemic index of rice. So of course, these traditional pairings were done in a way that would kind of not Give you the sugar spike. But as a vegetarian, my primary source of energy is rice. But I do a lot of veggies, a lot of lentils, all kinds of cuisines.

Oh wow. Well, I'll have to come see and we'll go out to dinner.

Um, Amberly, it's going to have to be lunch because dinner is not why I'm just, I'm just, I'm joking with you.

Well, you know what? I have early dinner. I like to eat. Yes, I do.

I'm like, I love that. I love that, Amberly.

I'm like, dinner plans at 5?

Yeah, that's me. That's me. 5, 5:30, take me out. I'll go. I love that.

Yeah, I do too. But I have to admit, there are some nights that I will have some yogurt and some almonds, and I gotta cut that out because it's at night. Now, every time I start to eat that, I'm gonna think of you, and I'm gonna remember that my digestion is not at its best, and I need to put the yogurt away.

So, you know what, once in a while we all do. I'm a big believer that you don't live with rigid rules, and you all, once in a while, we all break the rules, and it's important for our bodies, for our body to actually get used to that as well. That's a very big principle of Ayurveda that you get used to a little bit of poison regularly and whatever that is, right? So poison doesn't really mean poison. Poison just means that something against the wellness norm. So that's completely okay, even though my biggest recommendation for people who get hungry at night, and if you do dairy, is to do a cup of hot milk with a spice. It's a great tranquilizer and it works really well in the body at night. Helps to lower cortisol.

Wait, so a cup of warm milk with spice, did you say?

Yeah. Yeah. You could put cardamom powder in it. You can put a strand or 2 of saffron. You can put some shaved almonds with a pinch of ginger powder. There's so much that you can put in that hot milk, the turmeric, whatever you like. But like a nice cup of hot milk will help to lower cortisol, give you better sleep as well.

Oh, well, you know what? The little babies, Didn't have it wrong, did they? They knew that warm milk make you go to sleep. Okay, so your book, Your Body Already Knows, resonates with so many. What's the core message you hope readers take home?

Yeah, Amberly, I think the core message that the readers take home is exactly where we started, which is that you have the ability to really be empowered to create your own healing. and your own wellness. You don't, as, just as animals know, we know our body has intelligence. We have lost the framework to come back to our body. So the book gives you a framework because I can tell you, hey, come back to the intelligence of your body, but without a framework, it can be very confusing. So firstly, it's like my idea of writing this book is to bring back that belief in yourself, but not through just motivational words. That's not at all what the book is about. It actually gives you a systematic framework And then helps you to try it for 21 days, over a period of 21 days, day by day by day, where you learn how to change your life and change the way your body heals with a lot of ease. I will tell— I will say this, Amberly, for anyone who's going to read the book, the idea of the book is not to give you more rigid practices. The idea of the book is to allow you to do more rather than to do less. to take away all those restrictions and to really leave you feeling liberated.

I love that. Well, what is one wellness ritual that you practice daily, something you never skip?

Oiling my body, which is a big deal in Ayurveda, that your skin is a channel of consumption. And oiling, we oil everything from the hair to the scalp, to the ears, to the nose, to the oil pulling in the mouth, to oil in the belly button, to oiling the body.

What does oil in the belly button do?

So it's become like a trend now on TikTok, And, but basically, yeah, it's become a big trend, but you basically put oil in your belly button and you kind of massage it clockwise outside the belly button, and you'll see that the oil gets absorbed very quickly. So your belly button, which was your umbilicus, which was connected, is such a main source of, you know, connection to your mother, is basically your body can receive nourishment from the belly button. And in our inflamed digestive systems, it's very regulating. It regulates bloating, regulates microbiome, and there you feel it. You feel much better right away. But the one that I like even more is the body oiling, which I would do usually before I get— it's before you get into the shower, not after, because that oil gets absorbed into your pores, supports the synthesis of vitamin D, strengthens your joints, regulates your nervous system, replenishes the microbiome on your skin, lymphatic drainage. I cannot even tell you the number of benefits. It also is a great detoxifier because oil has this unique quality of wherever it settles in, it goes to the base and the bottom, and it pulls grime to the top. That's why if you drop oil somewhere, in a few days, it's going to become grease because every— all the muck and the dirt that was already in it will come to the surface. So you kind of oil your body before you shower, and when you go in the shower, the water is not going to be half as harsh on your skin as it could have been. And people Become addicted to this practice. And it's a very important practice in Ayurveda. We love oil on the body.

What kind of oil?

So look, traditionally people use sesame oil or there's certain herbal oils that people use, but I tell people not to start with sesame oil. I tell people you start with a simple oil like, you know, Trader Joe's here in the US has something called the lemongrass coconut oil. Super easy. It's oil in a pump bottle, very light oil. It's a great place to start. And if you've done that for a year or 2 and the practice has become part of your morning rituals, then you can move to just plain expeller-pressed sesame oil.

Okay. Why not start with sesame oil first?

I think it's great to start with sesame oil. I've just seen that the learning curve is better. Amberly, if somebody's like, with it sold, start with sesame oil today. Especially if you're in your perimenopausal years, sesame is known to regulate estrogen and progesterone both. And I suspect that it also works as like an HRT of a certain sort. So, if you are, if you can start with sesame, it feels a little bit more tedious, and because the oil is a little bit thicker, sesame oil, versus that lemongrass coconut oil from Trader Joe's is super light. So, just kind of, you know, you ease into the practice, you phase into the practice, and then if you switch to sesame, you'll be more likely to do it and keep with it.

Oh, that's fascinating. Well, you know what? I was speaking at this event, And it was like the second day of the event. It was like nonstop. And, um, one of my friends is a healer and I walked over. I was like, I'm starting to feel nauseous and I have to go on stage. I'm about to go on stage. And she goes, here, take this. And she gave me peppermint oil and she had me rub it in my hands and I rubbed it on my stomach. And then she said, here, lick this. And she put it on the back of my hand and I licked the oil. I was like desperate. Whatever it was, it worked.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That makes sense.

Yeah, yeah. So I'm fascinated now. I want to go see what oil I have. I use a lot of almond oil. I love almond oil.

That's fine too. Almond oil is fine too. But in the long term, you want to move to a sesame-based oil because of the estrogen and progesterone.

Okay. Well, I just got my blood work for all that, that fun stuff. So it's interesting. I feel like you gave me some really good reminders about so many things, and I can't wait to dive more into your book. Okay, we're just going to do like a little, a few fast round questions.

Let's do it.

What are 3 books that changed your health perspective?

I read mostly the ancient texts, but I would say all the ancient textbooks of Ayurveda, but also The Book of Breath by James Nestor.

Okay. And your book, of course.

Yeah, I did too. I did too. Writing it changed my world. Yeah.

Yeah. It's very cathartic, isn't it?

Very, very fulfilling if you're into writing your own work. Yeah.

What is a wellness myth you wish people would stop believing?

That consuming protein in its isolate forms can be very heavy for the body, and the body needs good fats and Protein needs to be combined and cooked for you to digest it well.

Okay, that's good. Well, what's your favorite nourishing meal right now?

It would be rice with black beans and lots of veggies with a really good dressing on top. Really warm with lots of herbs, cilantro, chives. Love it.

Oh, now I'm hungry. Well, where's the best place for people to grab your new book?

I think anywhere that they sell books. I think easiest these days is Amazon, but it's on Barnes Noble. Any top bookseller would have it. But of course, Amazon is the easiest.

Okay. Yeah, it is. One click and you got there. And then let people know where they can find you and learn more because you give such incredible tips. Through your reels on social media, I haven't even followed you on TikTok because I'm not really on there that much.

But I had me too. I'm like barely on TikTok, Emily. So I hear you.

Oh, you're not either? Really?

I I am. I do have an account, but I'm not really active on TikTok that much.

Okay, that makes me feel better because like I was trying to convince my daughter to do my TikTok account because she's so good at it. But but she won't do it. But yeah, I could see where your stuff would go viral on TikTok because yeah, so many things, especially the one about the. Headache.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's very easy. That's such a good one.

Yeah. You'll have to head over to her Instagram to see these videos and learn how you can cure your headache. Um, and so many other things. So where's the best place for people to find everything that you offer? Um, if they want to hire you to come speak or if they want to see where you're speaking next or what you're up to, where's the best place for people to go? Yeah.

Thank you for asking. So my Instagram is a great place if you want daily updates or what's been on my mind. And, it's @mai_ayurvedic_life. You can also find me on my website, which is myentirename.com. So, www.nidhipandya.com. So, or just look at Nidhi Pandya Ayurveda on Google, and you'll find my website. And then, you'll also, that'll link you to all the other work. I work with women through the year in groups for over a 21-day radical transformation program, where I help people to find their inner climate and take them on a journey I also run a nutrition program every year where I train people to become Ayurvedic nutritionists. Oh, that's so cool. Yes.

Yeah, that's so exciting. Well, y'all don't worry, I'm going to put all the links in the show notes so you can easily find her with one click. And thank you so much for taking time to come and pour into the Amberly Lago Show and be here. I just appreciate you so much.

Thank you so much, Amberly, and I wish you well as well for Thank you.

Thank you so much. And I just appreciate you tuning into the show. Thank you. It's because of you listening and sharing the show that this has become a top 1% podcast. So thank you for tuning in and we will see you next week.