Focus on Balancing Pitta

Updated 2018

Based on your results, we recommend that you focus on balancing pitta through lifestyle practices, dietary choices, and herbal support.

Lifestyle Recommendations

Pitta can be rather intense, and very much likes to be in control, so adapting your lifestyle to balance these tendencies can be truly transformative. Favor experiences that are mentally and physically cooling, soothing, sweet, nourishing, and stabilizing to the mind and body. Here are a few ideas:

Embrace Relaxed Effort by showing a willingness to slow down, make mistakes, and truly enjoy yourself. Invite this energy into any aspect of your life that needs it—work, exercise, relationships, and so forth.

Follow a Pitta-Pacifying Daily Routine with choices like balancing work with play, creating consistency, and retiring before 10 p.m.

Practice Pranayama, which can have a profoundly calming effect on the entire system. Just ten to fifteen minutes of simple yogic breathing exercises each day can be life-changing. Sheetali and Nadi Shodhana are especially good for balancing pitta.

Diet Recommendations

Favor a diet of fresh, whole foods (both cooked and raw) that are cooling, hearty, nourishing, and comparatively dry. This helps to decrease internal heat, prevent inflammation, balance the digestive fire, ground the body, and absorb excess liquid and oil. Pitta does not generally view eating as an especially “productive” activity, so you can also balance pitta by consciously slowing down, and giving your full attention to each meal. Here are some additional tips:

Favor Pitta-Pacifying Tastes. To balance pitta, choose foods that are:

Sweet (think grains, fruit, squashes, root vegetables, and fresh dairy products)
Bitter (think bitter greens like kale, dandelion, or collards, and spices like cumin and turmeric)
Astringent (think legumes, vegetables, apples, cranberries, green bananas, and pomegranates)

Reduce Pitta-Aggravating Tastes. To further pacify pitta, moderate foods that are:

Pungent (think spicy foods like chilies, radishes, raw garlic, raw onion, and especially heating spices)
Sour (think vinegar, pineapples, grapefruits, and alcohol)
Salty (think salt)