"Make sure to eat well."

How many times did I hear that during my own recovery? But what does it actually mean? Eating a lot? Eating healthy? Avoiding sugar? Avoiding fat? Everyone had an opinion, and none of it made me feel less lost.

In India, food is something sacred. In every household, making sure everyone is fed is non-negotiable, it's not a diet plan, it's love. And contrary to how we approach food in the West, it's often much simpler, much more filling, and much more healing, thanks to the Ayurvedic herbs, spices, and the famous ghee that show up in nearly every meal.

I started living in India permanently in 2023. Before that, I'd been traveling there once a year since 2021 for my retreats, staying a few weeks at a time to study Ayurveda and deepen my yoga practice. It's there that I relearned what nourishing my body actually means.

Before that, I would tried every diet, every supplement, every "eat clean" rule you can imagine. Nothing worked because I was so focused on what to eat that I never once asked whether my body could actually digest and absorb any of it.

Ayurveda teaches us to live in harmony with nature, in a state of balance where fulfillment is about being, not becoming. I learned to eat in a way that let my body receive what it needed, starting with the most overlooked piece of the puzzle: digestion.

One of the first things I learned was food combining. In Ayurveda, certain foods shouldn't be eaten together, because the combination is harder to digest than either food on its own, this creates something called ama.

Ama is best understood as undigested residue, a kind of internal "sludge" that forms when digestion is incomplete. Instead of being absorbed as nourishment, this residue lingers in the body, clogging the subtle channels (srotas) that are meant to carry nutrients, energy and waste through your system. Over time, ama is considered the root of most imbalance and disease in Ayurveda, not because any single food is "bad," but because poor digestion turns even good food into a burden rather than fuel.

Fruit mixed with other foods especially dairy or milk with yogurt, are two classic examples of combinations that tend to produce ama. When I stopped combining them, the difference in my digestion was almost immediate, I felt lighter, more energized, and far less bloated.

In Ayurveda, the body is nourished through seven layers of tissue, called dhatus — each one built from the one before it, in sequence:

Rasa (plasma) → Rakta (blood) → Mamsa (muscle) → Meda (fat) → Asthi (bone) → Majja (bone marrow & nervous tissue) → Shukra/Artava (reproductive tissue)

Here's the part that matters most for you: your reproductive tissue is the very last dhatu in the sequence. It only receives nourishment once all six tissues before it have been sufficiently fed. This is exactly why hypothalamic amenorrhea happens, your body is deeply intelligent and when energy is scarce, it prioritizes the tissues that keep you alive today (blood, muscle, nervous system) over the one responsible for a future pregnancy.

So if digestion is weak, if what you're eating isn't being properly broken down and absorbed even eating "a lot" won't be enough. The nourishment simply won't make it all the way down the chain to where your cycle lives.

This is why so many women in recovery say, "I'm eating so much and still no period." It's rarely a quantity problem. It's very often a digestion and absorption problem, which is exactly why how and when we eat matters just as much as what.

There's another principle in Ayurveda that I love, because it's so intuitive once you hear it: like nourishes like. To rebuild a tissue, you eat foods that resemble what that tissue needs.

For shukra, the reproductive tissue, the foods traditionally considered most nourishing are dense, rich, and "generative" by nature: ghee, milk, nuts, dates... and eggs. Eggs in particular are seen as a near-perfect shukra-building food, because an egg is, quite literally, a whole reproductive cell, packed with everything needed to create life. Eating them is a direct, almost symbolic way of feeding the very tissue your body is struggling to prioritize.

This is why you'll see eggs built directly into this week's challenge, not as a random protein source, but as a targeted way of speaking your reproductive system's language.

This week, the challenge is simple: give your digestive fire the conditions it needs to actually do its job, and make sure every meal is genuinely full, not "good enough," but full.

The rule: keep fruit and dairy at least 2 hours away from your main meals and have two eggs each day, cooked the way you want.

Here's what a full day could look like:

Do you need to count calories? Honestly, no. Once you give your body real nourishment and proper digestion, your hunger cues become a reliable guide again. That said, this only works if you commit to the three full meals plus snacks. No skipping, no "just a salad."

The challenge runs from this Sunday through Friday. Are you in?

I would loove to hear from you, reply and let me know how it goes, what feels easy and what brings up resistance (guilt around "too much" food is completely normal here, and worth noticing without judgment).

If you feel like you want to go deeper into your own healing from HA, I'm here in a few ways:

This journey doesn't have to be a battle. We can find a simpler way back to your true self.

With love, Audrey