Take a second to think about this: the fatigue we feel in November is a different animal from the tiredness of August. August’s tiredness is overheated and depleted, the tiredness of too much heat and humidity and not enough stillness. November tiredness is heavier, slower, more interested in bowls of something warm and in going to bed at 9pm. Our bodies vocalise what they need in ways like this, and when we’re listening, we make different choices, responding to these nudges.
Most of us do not. We eat the same foods year-round because the supermarket makes everything available. We sleep approximately the same number of hours regardless of whether the sun sets at 5.30pm or 7.30pm. We maintain the same pace through summer and winter, monsoon and dry season, because the calendar of work and obligations does not account for the weather.
I lived in Delhi for years, and the difference between winter and summer eating was impossible to ignore. Winter in Delhi is cold, dry and grey, and your body wants warm things, rich things, and suddenly you’re thinking about dal makhani and paratha for the first time since April, and that nimbu paani at 4pm no longer appeals. The idea of eating a favourite salad in January, I recall, felt both ludicrous and like punishment. Summer is the opposite: that heat that makes the thought of heavy food insane, when you want chaas, cucumbers, and things that involve no cooking whatsoever. The truth is, our bodies know exactly what they need, and they’re not particularly subtle about telling us.
Festivals as seasonal instructions
The Indian festival calendar is largely lunar, and if you look at what it actually marks, it’s far from arbitrary. January brings Lohri, Makar Sankranti and Pongal, each a different regional name for the same thing: the sun’s transit northward, the end of the shortest days, the return of warmth and light. The bonfires common to many of these celebrations aren’t merely decorative; fire in midwinter, gathering around warmth, these are the body’s seasonal needs made communal. The foods aren’t just handed-down celebratory habits either: til, jaggery, peanuts, puffed rice, dense and warming and calorie-rich, eaten at the coldest point of the year because that’s when the body needs more energy to maintain its temperature.
Holi arrives in March at the spring equinox, the moment the year tips towards warmth, and with it brings colour and water and the release of winter’s heaviness. Onam in Kerala marks the monsoon harvest in August. The festival calendar is a map of the agricultural year, which is itself a map of what the body needs at different times: when to eat heavily, when to fast, when to celebrate abundance, and when to rest or cleanse.
What your body is tracking
There is a place where all this inherited wisdom meets biology, and where we see how both describe the same thing, albeit in different languages. Our bodies read the season through light, and they do so with shocking precision. Deep in the brain, in the hypothalamus, sits a cluster of around twenty thousand neurons called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the master clock that keeps the rest of the body roughly on schedule. It takes its cue from a specialised set of cells in the retina, ones that exist not to help you see but purely to report how much light is hitting your eyes and of what kind. That signal sets the clock daily, and, crucially, it also tells the body what time of year it is, because the clock tracks not just when it’s light but for how long.
The mechanism it uses is melatonin, the hormone most people think of only in relation to sleep. Melatonin is released in the dark and shut off by light, which means the length of the nightly melatonin window is, in effect, the body’s internal reading of the season: short in summer when nights are brief, long in winter when darkness stretches. Studies conducted at high latitudes, where the seasonal swing is dramatic, find exactly this, with the duration of nocturnal melatonin secretion running longer in winter and the whole rhythm shifting. Your body, in other words, holds an internal representation of day length, and it adjusts your physiology to match. The winter urge to sleep longer, to want heavier food, to feel slow in the low-light months, none of this is a failure of discipline. It’s a body doing precisely what it evolved to do, reading a long night and responding to it.
The trouble is that we have hidden the signal. Under electric light, the body never quite gets the long, dark winter night it is trying to read, so the system sits slightly out of phase with the actual season, receiving a muddled version of the information it was built to track. This is where a small intervention does real work: getting outside in the morning. It’s so small, this shift, and so simple, but outdoor light (even under clouds) delivers somewhere between ten and a hundred times the intensity of ordinary indoor lighting, which is too dim to register as a proper daytime signal. Ten minutes of it in the first hour after waking sharpens the clock’s sense of where it is in the day and the year, and it does so through the same light-sensing pathway that governs the cortisol you need to feel awake. It is the single most effective way to tell your body which season it is actually in.
And this is exactly what ritucharya, Ayurveda’s framework of seasonal living, was formalising long before anyone had mapped a retinal ganglion cell. Its principle is that the body has different needs across the six seasons of the subcontinent and that food and routine should move with them: warming foods, more oil and more rest for the winter body; cooling foods, lighter meals and more water for the summer one; easily digestible food and fewer plans for the monsoon body dealing with humidity and erratic light. The tradition arrived at this through centuries of accumulated observations, while biology arrived at it through electrodes and saliva samples. What’s remarkable and very cool is that they agree! It is, if you sit with it for a second, such a lovely and reassuring thought, that both the oldest instruction and the newest evidence are pointing at the same small, daily things.
Small adjustments that work
Eat the produce that is actually in season, which in India changes often: strawberries in winter, mangoes in summer, jamun and litchi before the monsoon ends, guavas when the chill arrives. Let sleep shift slightly with the light rather than overriding the earlier tiredness of winter evenings with screens until midnight. Get outside in the morning, because ten minutes of natural light before 9am does more for the body’s sense of where it is in the year than almost anything else.
Cook with warming spices in winter and cooling ones in summer, which most Indian cooking already does by instinct: winter saag heavy with ginger and garlic, summer chaas flavoured with coriander and mint. Give yourself permission to cancel plans in the monsoon, to stay home on a particularly heavy evening of rain, because this is seasonally appropriate behaviour rather than a lapse.
Use the festival calendar as a set of prompts to eat differently and to mark the passage of time with your body rather than just your diary. Eat til and jaggery at Makar Sankranti. Cook those festival foods and lean into the seasonal specialities… These are acts of seasonal attunement that also happen to be delicious. What is the challenge in that?
The thing to remind oneself is that the point is not purity but direction: moving generally towards alignment with the year, noticing the cues the body is already sending, and responding to them when it is easy rather than overriding them on principle. Your body already knows what season it is. The practice is learning to listen.
1,000 Ways to Live Well is a Mille publication. Mille is a modern nutrition brand built around everyday rituals, starting with protein that doesn't ask you to compromise on taste. millesupergrain.com
