Summer Wellness Tips
Summer is around the corner and with it comes sunshine, swimming, beach days, and long hours outdoors. While we welcome the joy this season brings, let’s also empower ourselves with knowledge to reduce potential health impacts and stay resilient throughout the year.
1. Diet & Digestion
Summer invites us to enjoy ice cream, cold smoothies, salads, and refreshing drinks. While these foods feel ideal in the heat, they can weaken digestion if not timed properly. In Ayurveda, cold and raw foods dampen agni (digestive fire) and aggravate vata, often leading to irregular sleep, mood swings, and weakened immunity.
When consumed daily and at the wrong times, these habits can leave the body depleted, especially as we enter fall when our immune system needs to be most resilient.
What can you do instead?
You can still enjoy your summer favorites. Just eat them at the right time. The best window for cold or raw foods is between 12pm and 3pm, when both the sun and your digestive fire are strongest.
Think of digestion like a seasonal clock:
Morning is like spring — gentle and awakening
Midday is summer or pitta time — strongest digestion
Evening is like autumn — slowing down, preparing for rest
Eating cold foods first thing in the morning or later in the evening can impair digestion and contribute to toxin buildup during sleep, when the body is meant to be detoxifying, not digesting. Timing your meals mindfully allows you to indulge with minimal impact.
2. Environmental Exposures: Mindful Swimming
Let’s talk about pools. While chlorine is necessary in most public water systems to prevent infections, it can also interfere with our endocrine health, particularly thyroid function. Girls, in particular, tend to be more susceptible to these effects.
Chlorine is a halogen, part of the same chemical family as iodine, along with fluorine and bromine. Because of their structural similarities, chlorine can compete with iodine for uptake by the thyroid gland. When chlorine displaces iodine at receptor sites, it may impair the body’s ability to produce adequate thyroid hormones and contribute to hypothyroidism over time.
Since iodine is essential for thyroid hormone production, supporting iodine levels becomes key to minimizing the impact of chlorine exposure.
How to protect yourself:
Choose saline pools when possible.
Support iodine levels naturally through foods like eggs, dairy, seafood, and seaweed (be sure it’s third-party tested to avoid heavy metal contamination).
Consider a dose of Chlorum 30c (homeopathic chlorine) after swimming in chlorinated water to help the body detox and minimize long-term impact.
By staying mindful of what we eat, when we eat it, and how we support our bodies through environmental exposures like swimming, we can enjoy all the beauty summer has to offer without compromising our long-term health.
