By Vasant Lad, Yoga+

Spring is the king of seasons — a time of sunshine and cheer, love and creativity. Mother Earth wakes up and causes sprouting; energy moves up; everything is blooming, full of color. We begin to feel more energetic and spend more time outdoors, where children are playing and the birds are singing. Spring is the season of celebration.

But it is also a time when many of us get spring colds. In addition, as flowers shed their pollen and emit sweet fragrances, many people get hay fever and allergies.

The qualities of spring are warm, moist, gentle, and unctuous. Due to the warmth, the accumulated snow and ice of winter begin to melt. Similarly, accumulated kapha (the mind-body force responsible for lubrication and sustained energy) in the body starts liquefying and running.

If you have a runny nose, asthma, congestion, or allergies; if you are feeling lazy, greedy, or attached, you probably have excess kapha. The best way to avoid these symptoms is to follow a kapha-reducing regimen. Try these seven time-tested tips and you’ll enjoy the best of spring.

Add Energizing Herbs to Your Diet
Good kapha-reducing herbs for spring include ginger, black pepper, trikatu, kutki, punarnava. Look for them online or at your local Indian or health food store.

Spring Detox
Try a weekly juice fast with fresh fruits and veggies such as carrots, beets, broccoli, parsley, apples, pomegranates, or berries, and take one teaspoon of triphala (an ayurvedic herbal compound) with a cup of hot water at night to keep the colon clean. You can also sign up for a 3- to 10-day panchakarma treatment at a well-reputed ayurveda clinic. Panchakarma, a cleansing and rejuvenation regimen, detoxifies the system, purifies the bodily tissues, and strengthens the immune system. Then, under the guidance of a qualified practitioner, follow instructions for a personalized rasayana (ayurvedic rejuvenation therapy) that will leave you feeling light and vivacious.

Stay Active
Sleeping after sunrise imbalances the kapha dosha. Instead, wake up early and go for a morning walk. Then practice invigorating sun salutations and asanas like fish, boat, bow, locust, lion, camel, headstand, and shoulderstand. Follow your hatha routine with energizing pranayama practices like bhastrika (the breath of fire), kapalabhati (the glowing skull breath), and brahmari (the bumble-bee breath.)

Adapt Your Diet
Agni (digestive fire) is low in the spring. That’s why ayurveda suggests eating less than you did in winter — when agni is high — especially if your predominant dosha is kapha.

Eat light, warming foods.
Bitter, pungent, and astringent foods are ideal for the spring. Enjoy a whole-foods diet of legumes such as yellow split peas, red lentils, garbanzos, pinto beans, soy products, and grains such as barley, buckwheat, corn, millet, or oats. For vegetables, try broccoli, radishes, spinach, okra, asparagus, artichokes, and onions, with hot spices like garlic, ginger, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and chili pepper. Salads with spring greens like dandelion and fresh-leaf lettuces will reduce kapha (although vata-dominant people should eat these sparingly). You can also eat pears, plums, apples, pomegranates, and rhubarb in moderation.

Digestive Drinks.
To keep your agni strong, drink a tea of cumin, coriander, and fennel powder in equal proportions, or make a homemade lassi: Combine 1 part yogurt with 4 parts water and 1/4 teaspoon of roasted cumin seed. Blend until creamy.

Avoid cold, heavy foods.
Sour, sweet, and salty foods like citrus fruits, ice cream, and potato chips increase the kapha dosha and should be avoided. Also reduce your use of dairy products and iced drinks — they dampen your digestive fire.

Use More Honey.
According to ayurveda, honey is heating and helps balance kapha in the spring. Use it as an alternative sweetener, or treat yourself to a cup of hot water with a teaspoon of honey.

Vasant Lad, BAMS, MASc, is a world-renowned ayurvedic physician and author. He is the founder of the Ayurvedic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico. His first name comes from the Sanskrit word vasanta, which means “spring”!

Yoga+ is an award-winning, independent magazine that contemplates the deeper dimensions of spiritual life--exploring the power of yoga practice and philosophy to not only transform our bodies and minds, but inspire meaningful engagement in our society, environment, and the global community.

By Michelle Pfennighaus, DivineCaroline

Imagine it. You’re watching Friends on prime time and wearing Doc Martins, Snapple iced tea in hand. In front of you is a box of fat free Snackwell’s cookies. Ah, the nineties. It made perfect sense. We were all going to get fat unless we stopped eating foods that contained fat! Perfect logic.

The fat free craze didn’t begin in the nineties though. For decades, scientists were warning of the dangers of fats. Saturated fat was deemed a killer, clogging the arteries, and causing our pants to get tighter.

Never mind that for thousands of years indigenous cultures ate animal fat at nearly every meal and only in recent times had obesity become a problem and heart disease become a number one killer. So, we ate less fat. I did, anyway. Snackwell’s cookies were super, right? Eat all you want—zero fat. The food industry had a field day, manipulating processed foods until they were marketable as “Low” or “No Fat.” And we bought them at a premium! We declared with glee, “I Can’t Believe its Not Butter!” The century ended full of hope for trim waistlines and healthy hearts.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you what happened.

It didn’t work. We are fatter and sicker than ever before. Many of us (myself included) ended up with dry skin, constipation, and a cold feeling in our bones. Our bodies’ need for fat manifested itself in magnificent cravings we satisfied at 3 a.m. with French fries and Ben & Jerry’s.

Hey Science, what gives?

Here’s what happened. We replaced fats that were maybe unhealthy with darn near fatal fats (think hydrogenated trans fat in margarine) and plenty of sugar, fillers, and chemicals. What brilliant ideas will we think of next?

I’d like to stop thinking of what’s next and reflect for a moment on what has come before. For thousands of years, populations around the world have thrived on indigenous diets of all sorts. Meat-based, plant-based, or a combination of the two, they all included fat. It was not until processed food was introduced that we encountered the diseases of excess that plague us today.

I encourage my clients to eat more foods that their great-grandparents would recognize and fewer foods created by modern science and advertised by big business.

Some of the ways oils are processed include adding hydrogen atoms or using chemical solvents. Does that sound like food you want to put in your body?

Newfangled fats to be skeptical of, or downright avoid:

• All hydrogenated oils, including margarine
• Soy and corn oil
• Peanut oil
• Canola and Grapeseed oil

Traditional, naturally occurring fats full of nutrients the human body needs:
(Always favor organic!)

• Butter and Ghee
• Coconut and sesame oils
• Olive oil
• Flax and Fish oil
• Chicken, goose, and duck fat
• Beef and lamb tallow

It has been an interesting shift to start eating fats again. After years of a “No Fat” mindset, it feels naughty to throw a pat of butter into my oatmeal. But good quality organic butter from grass-fed cows is exactly the kind of fat the body needs.

When I started eating more butter and taking fish oil, my skin really showed a difference. Lines in my face actually went away! Another great benefit is that I started to really enjoy my food. It’s no coincidence that fats taste good—we are programmed to enjoy them because we need them!

If you are worried about weight loss, look to the (highly refined) white flour products and (highly refined) sugar in your diet. Sally Fallon, author of Nourishing Traditions and founder of the Weston A. Price foundation, encourages us to use plenty of olive oil on our salads but skip the roll. And like my mom always says, “Everything in moderation.”

By Michelle Pfennighaus of WomenCo.

At DivineCaroline.com, women come together to learn from experts in the fields, of health, sustainability, and culture; to reflect on shared experiences; and to express themselves by writing and publishing stories about anything that matters to them. Here, real women publish like real pros. Together, with our staff writers, they’re discussing all facets of women’s lives from relationships and careers, to travel and healthy living. So come discover, read, learn, laugh and connect at DivineCaroline.com.

To me, healthy eating simply means removing, or limiting the foods in your diet that could be harming you and eating enough of the foods that contain the nutrients essential to your health. It is always preferable to get your nutrients from food itself rather than supplements, although replenishing nutrients using supplements is necessary, too. Most importantly, eating should be a pleasurable experience. If you are not enjoying your meals because you feel deprived or bored, your diet is not right for you. There is no one right diet, or way to eat, different people thrive on different foods.

1. Try doing some of your shopping at local farmers markets if possible. Here is a great link to find one near you.

2. Never go shopping when you are feeling hungry. This will help prevent impulse buying – usually something junky – to satisfy your hunger.

3. Most of your shopping should be in the outer aisles – the produce, the meats, fish, eggs. The inner aisles are usually full of processed foods (which you want to avoid) – the ones full of sugar, trans fats and other preservatives that extends their shelf life. Processed foods also tend to have a lot of the healthy protective micronutrients missing and are high in sodium and low in fiber.

4. Buy fresh food whenever possible – the fresher the food, the more nutritious.

5. Buy organic fruits and vegetables whenever you can and if possible, locally grown. Locally grown fruits and vegetables are less likely to have been sprayed with pesticides and chemicals. It’s also a great way to support local farmers.

6. Choose the most colorful fruits and vegetables, the more varied the colors, the better. This way you will get as many different phytonutrients as possible.

7. Choose simple whole foods – those closest to mother-nature. The more refined or processed, the less the nutritional value.

8. As a general rule, if there are ingredients that you cannot recognize, pronounce or spell, you should not be putting those into your body. And no cartoon characters either.

9. Become a label reader – though most of the foods you should be eating do not require labels. If you do buy packaged or boxed foods, know what is in them.

10. Be wary of “all natural” labels. Although I recommend an all natural way of eating, “all natural” on a label is often meaningless and deceptive and a guise for hidden sugars.

11. Look for sugars in all its different forms on the label. A variety of different versions of refined sugars are often used to trick you into thinking that there is not much sugar in the product. Here are some of the different versions of refined sugar – cane sugar, brown sugar, beet sugar, date sugar, grape sugar, glucose, sucrose, maltose, maltodextrin, dextran, dextrose, sorbitol, corn syrup, fructose, high fructose corn syrup, corn sugar, fruit juice, fruit juice concentrate, barley malt, caramel, carob syrup and sorghum syrup.

12. Look for the number of grams of sugar on a label – 4 grams is equivalent to 1 teaspoon. If possible buy foods that contain 3 grams or less.

13. Try to buy grass feds meats and free range chickens. Organic meats and poultry without hormones would be next best and if you cannot find them, then chose lean cuts of meats and remove the skin from chicken as this is where toxins are stored.

14. Limit buying fish with a high mercury content. Choosing ocean caught fish is generally better than farm raised fish which are usually full of PCB’s.

15. Lastly, bring your own shopping bags with you to the supermarket.

Follow Dr. Frank Lipman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lipmo .

Frank Lipman MD, is the founder and director of the Eleven Eleven Wellness Center in NYC a center whose emphasis is on preventive health care and patient education. His personal blend of Western and Eastern Medicine combined with the many other complimentary modalities he has studied has helped thousands of people recover their energy and zest for life. He is the author of the recent Revive: Stop Feeling Spent and Start Living Again (2009) and Total Renewal; 7 key steps to Resilience, Vitality and Long-Term Health (2003).

A recent study published in the latest Journal of the American Medical Association has found that people with Type 2 diabetes kept their blood glucose levels under better control when they ate foods like beans, fruits, vegetables, beans, nuts, flax seed and quinoa — a low-glycemic diet — than blood glucose levels in patients with diabetes eating a high-fiber diet.

The new study, which lasted six months, is one of the largest and longest to assess the impact of foods with a low-glycemic index.

Participants on the low-glycemic diet also saw significant improvements in cholesterol after six months, with increases in HDL, the so-called “good” cholesterol associated with a reduced risk of heart disease.

Participants on the low-glycemic diet saw their hemoglobin A1C levels — a measure of blood glucose levels over recent months — reduced slightly, by 0.5 percent on average, but experienced significant improvements in HDL, which increased by 1.7 milligrams per deciliter of blood on average. Those on the high-cereal diet saw smaller reductions in hemoglobin A1C and slight drops in HDL.

Dietitians who work with people who have Type 2 diabetes said earlier studies had not demonstrated the benefits of low-glycemic index foods as clearly as this report.

All of our meals are created with low-glycemic index carbohydrates for sustained energy so you don't have to sacrifice flavor and freshness in your quest for healthy eating.