Moving With the Seasons, Not Against Them

I was born in Dubai. Raised there until I was seventeen, then spent two years in Mumbai, and at nineteen moved to Chicago for university. On paper, it’s just geography but below that it was also a physiological disruption. One that took me years to understand, and one that I initially mistook for a personal failing.

Every winter, I’d arrive back in Chicago from Mumbai, from warmth, family, and a climate my nervous system had been built for, in the middle of a midwestern freeze. My body didn’t experience this as inconvenient. It experienced it as a threat signal. Cortisol elevated. Energy tanked. Recovery slowed. My physique stalled, then declined, even as I trained harder to compensate.

I thought I was mentally weak and Chicago wasn’t the right place for me. I thought something was wrong with me personally. What I didn’t understand was that I was fighting a physiological current, and no amount of discipline could ideally swim out of the current. This was never something I had to deal with as both Dubai and Mumbai stay within the same temperature through the year.

When I recognized that the stress was also environmental, and not only psychological, everything changed because I stopped treating my body’s response as a failure and started treating it as information.

Stress is not just a feeling. It is a full hormonal cascade with measurable, destructive effects on body composition, performance, and recovery. When your body perceives threat, whether that’s a predator, an argument, or in this case the climate your nervous system has never learned to trust, the same chain reaction fires.

What I was living through wasn’t cold alone causing this. It was cold combined with disrupted sleep, an unacclimatized nervous system, high training load, and not eating enough to support any of it. When those stressors stack, the hormonal environment shifts against you. The cascade looks like this:

• Perceived threat: cold, unfamiliar environment, isolation, chronic uncertainty, high training load, poor sleep
• Cortisol trends upward: particularly morning cortisol, which research runs higher in winter in many individuals
• Blood sugar dysregulates: stress and poor sleep worsen glycemic control
• Recovery hormones shift: testosterone and growth hormone responses become blunted under combined, prolonged stress and energy deficit
• Muscle protein synthesis drops: the work you put in the gym doesn’t convert

You train harder. You go backward. A trap with no exit until you address the root. I couldn’t point to a single obvious cause — I wasn’t injured, eating badly, or slacking — so I assumed the problem was internal. Character. Mindset. Effort. None of it was the issue. The issue was upstream from all of it.

When I began to articulate what I’d learned about moving and eating differently by season, I discovered Ayurveda speaks about this.

The Ayurvedic framework most relevant here is called Ritucharya, "seasonal regimen." It is a complete system for aligning diet, movement, sleep, and lifestyle with the intelligence of the world. Here are the core concepts at play:

• Ritucharya: Seasonal Regimen. The foundational practice of adjusting all lifestyle habits in alignment with each season’s qualities.
• Agni: Digestive Fire. The body’s metabolic intelligence. Strong Agni means efficient digestion, absorption, and energy conversion. Weak Agni leads to accumulation and stagnation.
• Dosha: Biological Humour. Vata (air/ether), Pitta (fire/water), and Kapha (earth/water), the three forces governing all physiological processes. Each season aggravates specific doshas.
• Sandhi Kala: Junctional Period. The transitional windows between seasons, spring and fall, when the body is most vulnerable and responsive to gentle recalibration.

I had arrived at these principles through experience, through noticing what my body did differently between Mumbai and Chicago, between winter and summer, between stress and ease. Ayurveda gave me the vocabulary and the validation.

Nature gives us the framework and we move with it for ideal living.

Winter Strategy (Kapha accumulates · Vata aggravates · Agni peaks)

Agni is at its strongest, eat more, eat heavier, eat warming foods. Your body needs heat from within; digestion generates it. Move with intention toward strength, power, and building. This is your growth season. Less outdoor movement means more energy available for heavy lifting. Use the stillness for deep reading, learning, and system building. Rest more. Sleep longer. Prioritize warming spices: ginger, black pepper, turmeric, cinnamon.

Summer Strategy (Pitta rises · High outward energy · Agni distributes)

Eat lighter, cooler, more water-rich foods. The body needs cooling. Smaller meals; heavy digestion generates too much internal heat. Maintain strength, move athletically, harvest what winter built. Be social. Pitta energy is outward, connective, magnetic. Launch things: businesses, relationships, projects, habits. Get leaner naturally.

Spring Strategy (Sandhi Kala · Transition · Kapha liquefies)

A junctional period. Let the body shift gears gradually. Lighten the diet as it warms; reduce heavy winter foods. Let your movement become more dynamic and varied. Don’t force extremes. Spring rewards patience and flow. Energy becomes more available; use it for momentum, not maximum.

Fall Strategy (Sandhi Kala · Transition · Vata rises)

The second junctional period, a time to slow and ground. Begin adding warmth and nourishment back to the diet. Vata aggravation can cause anxiety, dryness, and scattered energy. Counter it with routine, warmth, grounding foods, and oil. Start consolidating. Pull inward what summer’s expansiveness built.

Most people treat the calendar like it’s flat. Same output demanded every month, every quarter, every season. Moving the same way in January as in July. Ignoring how biological systems work, and it’s why people may plateau, burn out, or both. You can still progress if you have a mission in mind, but understanding these frameworks allow you to be more aware of external factors that may affect you.

This is not the case if you live in a place that always is roughly the same temperature throughout the year like Mediterranean climates — the effects of the temperature are minimal.

The seasonal framework resolves this. Winter is structurally a building period. Your Agni is strong, your body is conserving energy, your nervous system is oriented inward. Fighting that with high-output, socially demanding, scattered work is swimming against the current. Using it for strength, depth, and consolidation is working with physics.

Summer flips the equation. Pitta rises, energy becomes outward and expansive, leanness comes more naturally, social momentum builds on its own. This is when you launch, connect, and exert.

The mistake most driven people make is applying summer-level output pressure to a winter-configured body, then wondering why nothing converts. The effort goes in and results don’t come out.

Move with the season and you get a tailwind.