Experimenting with my daily routine: Planning

For this project, I wanted to experiment with my daily routine and how I could make it more ayurvedic. I already had some semblance of a routine, but wasn’t sticking to it very well, and found that I didn’t have enough time in the mornings for the things I wanted to be doing (e.g. asana and meditation). Actually, the main change I wanted to make was to regulate my eating schedule. Between my job at the restaurant and everything else I do, I find I don’t have a lot of time to devote to meals, and I end up eating at really weird times of day—think lunch around 3 pm and dinner around 10 at night. Which is not so great considering that a) I’m eating lunch after my digestive fire is past its prime, and b) I’m having dinner within an hour before going to bed. This didn’t seem like it would be good for my digestion or my sleep. I noticed that I was waking up a lot of mornings not feeling rested, and I wondered if I could change that by modifying my eating habits.

My initial thought was that I’d need to start eating breakfast earlier—around 8 am—so I’d be hungry for lunch earlier in the day (hopefully around noon), which in turn would make me want to eat dinner at a more normal time (around 6 pm). Since I don’t get a break to eat at these times, the only way to do this was to start bringing food to work and eating it in the back when I wasn’t too busy. This meant allowing extra time in the mornings to prepare my meals for the day.

It all sounded good in theory—but the whole plan hinged on my being able to eat an early breakfast. If I didn’t eat early enough, it would throw off my eating schedule for the rest of the day, and it would also mean not having enough time to get lunch and dinner ready to take to work. Normally I wasn’t even waking up until 8 am, so if I wanted my plan to work, I realized I was going to have to start getting up earlier in the morning—an hour or two earlier, realistically, if I wanted to have enough time for asana and meditation before breakfast.