Could Ayurveda be the missing piece to manage PCOD, inflammation and poor sleep? Five days at Ananda in the Himalayas suggests yes

The morning started at 7:30am with a personalised Ayurvedic consultation, followed by a vitals test. Ananda’s doctors conduct this with genuine rigour. It is not a questionnaire or a wellness survey—it is a detailed assessment of constitution, tendencies, and imbalances, the results of which inform every subsequent recommendation. The outcome of the consultation for me was: Pitta.

In Ayurveda—the Indian system of medicine with roots stretching back over 5,000 years—health is understood through the framework of three biological energies known as doshas: Vata (air and space), Pitta (fire and water), and Kapha (earth and water). Most people have a dominant dosha, though all three are present in varying degrees. Pitta types tend towards intensity, sharp digestion, and a susceptibility to inflammation, acidity and excess heat. The identification of one’s dosha is not categorisation for its own sake. It is the basis upon which a genuinely personalised programme is built.

Every treatment, every meal recommendation, and every piece of advice that followed was shaped by this understanding.

The centrepiece of the day was the formal book launch, presided over by Mahesh Natarajan, CEO of Ananda. The Healing Plate is an ambitious work—an integration of Ayurvedic principles and contemporary culinary practice, presented as a practical guide to eating with the body's constitution in mind rather than against it.

The presentations that accompanied the launch were among the highlights of the entire visit. Sreelal Sankar, head of Ayurveda at Ananda, gave a detailed and accessible explanation of Ayurvedic medicine—its principles, its logic and its relevance to the conditions that define modern ill-health. He spoke about the doshas not as philosophical abstractions but as physiological realities, observable in digestion, sleep patterns, inflammation responses, and the way the body ages.

Chef Diwaker Balodi, director of culinary, then spoke about the relationship between Ayurveda and food as Ananda practises it. The kitchen here is not independent of the clinic—the two are in constant dialogue. Every ingredient, preparation method and spice combination is considered through the lens of its effect on the body. The Healing Plate is the document that makes that philosophy available beyond the retreat itself.

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To mark the launch, guests were served a seven-course tasting menu—each course corresponding to one of the book's seven pillars of modern wellbeing: energy, digestion, inflammation, immunity, detoxification, cognition and sleep. These are not aspirational categories. They are, as Ananda frames them, the most pressing health priorities of contemporary life—the areas in which people most commonly struggle, and in which food, understood correctly, can make a measurable difference.

The menu that Chef Diwaker composed around these pillars was a study in restraint and precision. To address inflammation, a shun salad of citrus, roots, miso and walnuts—sharp, clean, and anti-inflammatory in both intention and effect. Digestion was represented by a carrot truffle dip with thyme and pine nuts, deceptively simple in its construction. A red lentil soup with ginger, curry leaf and lime addressed detoxification; corn lagdi with fenugreek, cumin and ghee spoke to energy. For cognition, a saffron vegetable stew with tofu, citrus and greens; for immunity, a yellow mung bean curry built on pepper, cardamom and lemon. The meal ended with a rose cardamom latte of rose, cardamom, almond and maple—designed, appropriately, to support sleep.

Each dish was thoughtful in the way that food rarely is when health is the stated objective. The ingredients were not medicinal in spite of the cooking—they were medicinal because of it.

Beyond the seven pillars lunch, every meal offered to me throughout the stay was drawn from a Pitta-specific menu designed for wellness guests. Dishes included a turmeric chicken skewer with coconut and spiced peanut chutney, a pearl millet kathi roll with cottage cheese filling and mint and coriander chutney, and Thai steamed chicken with vegetable laksa and flat rice noodles—food that was varied, genuinely satisfying and built around ingredients that work with rather than against a fire constitution.

What made the experience more granular than a standard wellness menu, however, was what happened at the level of the individual consultation. The doctor had identified specific ingredients that, despite being broadly acceptable for Pitta types, were not suited to my case: fenugreek, garlic, green chillies, corn, peanuts and cruciferous vegetables were all removed from the diet. The kitchen adjusted accordingly, modifying dishes to reflect the prescription precisely.

This is the detail that distinguishes Ananda from a retreat that simply offers healthy food. The goal, as the doctor framed it, was to understand the specific ways the body was being placed under stress—often unknowingly, through ingredients eaten routinely and without suspicion. For many people, the revelation is not dramatic. It is the recognition that the discomfort assumed to be normal has, in fact, been avoidable all along.

That afternoon brought a physiotherapy consultation—and a conversation that landed harder than expected. The doctor walked through the relationship between posture and ageing with considerable clarity: the way habitual misalignment compresses the spine, restricts circulation, and sets off a chain of compensations throughout the body. It is the kind of information that is easy to dismiss until someone maps it onto your own body specifically, at which point it is rather difficult to ignore.

The treatments that followed were the Dry Potli Treatment—a rhythmic application of warm herbal boluses that works at depth on the musculature—and Shirodhara, in which a continuous stream of warm medicated oil is poured across the forehead onto the ajna (third eye chakra) point. Shirodhara has a particular effect on the nervous system that is worth experiencing before attempting to describe. The mind becomes remarkably still. For a Pitta type prone to overstimulation, it is a treatment of real consequence.

The third morning began with a guided tour of Ananda in the Himalayas’ herb garden with the chef, covering both the therapeutic and culinary uses of medicinal plants. The garden is working rather than decorative and the tour moved through it with real specificity. Kala Bansa, a local Himalayan herb grown on the estate, is used in the treatment of lung disorders. Lemon balm and lemongrass are prescribed for aggravated Pitta—both cooling in nature, with properties that address inflammation and swelling. Nut grass, meanwhile, has a more immediate application: relief from insect bites. Each plant had a precise function, and in many cases, a dual role in both the treatment room and the kitchen.

The tour made vivid something that Ayurveda has always held to be true: that the distinction between food and medicine is largely a modern invention. These plants predate the pharmacy by several thousand years.

What followed was one of the more genuinely engaging demonstrations of the visit—a zero-waste cooking showcase taken directly from The Healing Plate. Chef Diwaker presented a series of dishes made entirely from ingredients that would ordinarily be discarded: milk from leftover rice, a full curry from watermelon rind, soup from vegetable peels, granola from leftover bread and chapatis. The creativity on display was real, and the point extended beyond sustainability. Ayurveda has always understood that the whole of a plant—not just its most obviously desirable parts—carries nutritional and medicinal value.

That day’s ayurvedic treatments were the Abhyanga Swedana—a full-body warm oil massage followed by herbal steam therapy—and the Manipura Massage, focused on the solar plexus, which in Ayurvedic anatomy is the seat of Pitta energy and digestive function. It started off with a Himalayan salt scrub that brushed off all the negativity before the medicated oil nourished the skin. For someone with a dominant fire constitution, the targeted pressure points felt precise, and almost necessary.

Day four began with a yoga consultation and session, again tailored to a Pitta constitution—cooling, grounding postures designed to work with the body’s tendencies rather than exacerbate them. It was a reminder that yoga, in its original form, was a medical and meditative practice long before it became a fitness one.

The morning also included a tour of Ananda in the Himalayas—the palace suites, which once hosted the last British viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten, with views across the valley, the pool villas, the treatment pavilions. The estate carries its heritage well. The architecture and setting are remarkable, but they serve the purpose of the place rather than competing with it.

The treatment of the day was Udwarthana—a vigorous herbal powder scrub that works on the lymphatic system, stimulates circulation, and addresses metabolic and hormonal imbalances. In Ayurvedic medicine, it is a therapy with specific relevance for conditions such as PCOD. Living with PCOD, the effects of the Udwarthana were striking—a genuine sense of the body functioning more efficiently, the kind of response that makes clear why Ayurvedic treatments are individually prescribed rather than simply selected from a menu. The day ended with a follow-up consultation with the doctor to review how the body had responded, and I could tell even without the consultation that the puffiness in my face had reduced, my stomach felt lighter and the energy levels seemed to be on the rise.

The final full day began with a repeat vitals test—a useful measure of what five days of structured, personalised care can produce. The numbers, and the physical sense of the body after five days, made for an instructive comparison with day one.

A Kostha Abhyanga treatment—a deep abdominal treatment focused on the digestive organs—was followed by a debrief with the doctor: a thorough review of observations, shifts and recommendations to carry forward. This is one of Ananda’s more important distinctions. The programme is not self-contained. Guests leave with a clear protocol for continuing what has been started, with an understanding of why each element matters for their specific constitution.

Hatha yoga followed and then—on the doctor’s recommendation, given how the body had responded earlier, a second Udwarthana session was done.

The day, and the visit, ended in the town of Rishikesh for the Ganga Aarti. Standing on the ghats as the priests conducted their evening fire ceremony—flames over the water, chanting in the cooling air—it was easy to understand why this stretch of the Himalayan foothills has been a place of pilgrimage and practice for thousands of years. There is a quality to it that sits outside the language of wellness itineraries entirely.

From the moment of arriving at the property, there had been a persistent drowsiness that was difficult to place. The body was calm, settled in a way that felt unfamiliar. Whether it was the mantras playing through the spa corridors, the flute drifting through the restaurant, or simply the crisp mountain air was hard to say. Something about the place induced sleep, and it continued through most of the second day.

When I asked the doctor, her explanation was straightforward: the food and the massages were balancing my doshas. With a Pitta dosha as elevated as mine, the body had been running on a sustained baseline of anxiety and overstimulation. As the treatments began to work and the prescribed diet took effect, the nervous system was—perhaps for the first time in a long while—genuinely at rest. The drowsiness was not fatigue. It was the body recalibrating to a state it had forgotten: calm as a baseline rather than an exception. The realisation that this was what rest actually felt like, as opposed to the exhausted alertness that passes for normal in most working lives, was one of the more significant moments of the trip. It was only from the third day onwards that a different kind of energy began to surface—clearer, steadier and noticeably more present.

Five days at Ananda produces something more durable than relaxation. The Pitta diagnosis shaped every recommendation made over the course of the visit, from the specific treatments prescribed to the dietary adjustments suggested, to the yoga sequences designed for a fire constitution. Conditions like PCOD, which sit at the intersection of the hormonal, metabolic and inflammatory—exactly the territory that Ayurveda has mapped with considerable sophistication—responded in ways that felt meaningful rather than incidental.

Ananda in the Himalayas is not a quick fix and does not present itself as one. It is a serious institution, and five days is barely enough to scratch the surface of what it offers. But it is more than enough to come away with a clearer understanding of one’s own body and a more intelligent relationship with how to look after it.

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