The most important thing you can do is get your bowels moving daily (Triphala is an excellent Ayurvedic capsule formula you can take in the evenings to ensure morning bowel movements.)
Drink hot water or tea with every meal, never cold or iced. Hot water helps break down, liquefy and emulsify the fats in your meal. Ever put oil in the fridge and watch it get solid and hard? Don’t do that to your stomach!
Minimize consumption of: fatty, fried and greasy foods (for example french fries, hamburgers, pizza, and cheese), cold foods and drinks (including raw foods, fruit, tofu, milk or soy/plant milk, iced drinks, salads, ice cream and other refrigerated or iced items), and simple carbs (especially flour products like muffins, pastries, crackers, breads, toast, pasta, cakes and chips of all types).
Chew on fennel seeds after meals to stimulate proper digestion and avoid undigested food.
Do not overeat.
Try drinking hawthorn berry tea with honey at night instead of having dessert, which like triphala really helps to clean your system out and strengthen digestion.
3. Get rid of “the cold”
TCM teaches that people with small/absent lunulas are often bothered by “pathogenic cold” (yang deficiency) and weak immunity.
Thi
s can be a direct result of the Western equivalent to “yang deficiency”: low thyroid. When your thyroid is low, circulation is poor and your hands and feet are often frozen. Again, it is wonderful to drink ginger tea in the mornings, especially if you have symptoms of yang deficiency which can include menstrual cramps, aversion to cold, lack of circulation, poor appetite, fatigue, achy joints, cold hands and feet, poor digestion, depression, etc. It’s also important to get your thyroid tested if you have these symptoms (here are the labs you should be asking for), and either create a plan with your practitioner to improve thyroid function naturally OR replace the thyroid hormone you’re low in via something like natural desiccated thyroid (NDT). Treating an undiagnosed thyroid condition can change your life, especially if you suffer from mood disorders. A mental illness should never be diagnosed until thyroid issues are ruled out, but unfortunately most doctors only test TSH levels which can mean you easily miss a true thyroid issue. Make sure you read the lab page I linked – sometimes the best indicator of poor thyroid function is high “Reverse T3,” meaning active T3 is not getting into the cells.
