Ayurveda Series 1 – What Is Your Body Type?

What I am going to share with you today is in my opinion one of the most empowering things for us all to understand! This is a teaser of what you can expect in my Ayurveda Series 1 of podcasts, focused on the three main Ayurvedic doshas... Vata, Pitta and Kapha, also known in the modern medical world as Ectomorph, mesomorph and Endomorph. Once you understand your own unique body type, you will come to truly 'own' your beautiful body in a way you never dreamed possible.

If you want to learn your body type, it is always best to consult with an Ayurvedic practitioner face to face if you can so they can read your pulse. But this is not always essential. A great practitioner will know your type within seconds over Skype.

Episode Resources


Welcome back to The Nick Broadhurst Show. I’m your host, Nick Broadhurst. You can catch all of my work, all of my podcasts, music, music videos, everything that I do, blog posts over at www.iamnickbroadhurst.com. And my music is available on all platforms including Spotify which you can catch by going to iamnickbroadhurst.com/Spotify.

And that song you were listening to is a song called Open Wide, it’s my latest release, and the title track of my tour around Australia at the moment, and it has been so, so much fun performing this song live. And it definitely is in line with what we’re going to talk about today because this information has been so empowering for me, it’s really led to me living a much more open wide life.

I was meditating today, and towards the end of my meditation I just had this most overwhelming feeling of gratitude. I just can’t sometimes believe how good life is. I know every single person is having a different experience every single day, and I’ve certainly had my challenges, I’m not going to deny it. But in these moments where everything feels great I think it’s really important to celebrate that, to honor that. And right now for me, everything feels so fantastic. And I just had this overwhelming sense of gratitude for life.

And in my Open Wide tour at the moment I’ve been very, very open talking about my experience that I had in 2017. And for most of that year I had the complete blinkers on; which means I didn’t feel this gratitude, I didn’t look up, I didn’t see everything I had around me to be grateful for. So I want to just start today’s episode by encouraging you to look up and just see everything that you have, because even in those moments that feel really crappy, there is still so much to be grateful for.

And what’s interesting is that for 2017 I forgot a lot of what I’m going to speak about today, or I ignored it, and I cannot tell you how excited I am to finally share this information on Ayurveda. And this is going to be Ayurveda Series 1 for The Nick Broadhurst Show. And this series is going to be focused more on body types.

And today’s episode is a bit more of an introduction to what to expect in the next three episodes, and I want to just give you a bit of a high level overview of why this is so, so important. I actually believe this is quite possibly the most empowering information, certainly from a physical perspective that you will ever come across and I feel really, really honored to be able to share this with you.

So it sort of came to me this morning; I was doing yoga and I had my shirt off and I was doing a plank pose, and I looked down at my body and felt this immense gratitude for this beautiful, lean body that I have, and I thought, “Man, how lucky am I? How many people would love to have a beautiful, lean body?” But it’s not all about that because each body type has its own plusses and minuses.

And what I want to show you in this series is how to totally own your body type, and totally be proud of it because trust me, while I might be lean and that’s great, that makes life a lot easier, I don’t have to worry about weight, but trust me there are other parts of this, the minuses, which make life very challenging for me which other people don’t have to worry about, and I want to teach this to you; I want this information to be part of your daily operating system.

So for those of you who don’t know, Ayurveda is a very, very system of medicine; it’s really the science of life to be honest. But it’s used very practically from a physical perspective through the Ayurveda Medicine System, and there’s lots of other systems out there like Traditional Chinese Medicine for example, but I totally believe that Ayurveda is the most complete system, and if you get your head around some of these basic concepts, it will transform your life 100%.

And I do want to just pay it forward and thank a few of my mentors who have taught me so much about this, and of course I’ve read books and I’ve had I guess virtual mentors within books and watching videos etcetera. But my real life mentors are Laura Plumb and her husband Bhava Ram, who I’ve spoken about a lot; they’re very dear friends of mine, and Dr. Stephen Cabral.

These three people have taught me so much about this, and at times I haven’t wanted to hear it but in hindsight when I look back, I think, “Oh gosh, why didn’t I just listen to this earlier?” I would have saved myself so much pain to be honest.

And in Ayurveda there are what’s called ‘Doshas’ and they govern a lot, everything that’s in your life. But we’re going to talk about the doshas as how they refer to your body type, okay? And I’ll go into each one of these following doshas in a lot more depth in my Ayurveda Series 1, which is focused on the body types; it’s focused on the physical and in Series 2 and possibly 3 or more, I’ll talk about how these doshas are not just physical and how they govern so, so, so much of what we do every day.

But let’s start with the very first dosha, and that is; vata. So vata in a science-based perspective is also called an ‘ectomorph.’ And somehow more than 5000 years ago in Ayurveda, without all the modern tests and all the tools, they already had this all figured out. But now it’s all been scientifically proven, or demonstrated, that there are different body types. So vata=ectomorph in the modern perspective, and I might use those two terms interchangeably, so you know what I’m talking about.

The next one is; pitta, which in the science-based perspective is called the mesomorph. And then you have; kapha, which is the endomorph, and as I said, I’ll get into more detail of what these are, this is just a bit of a teaser for what’s to come.

But a quick example of how this has impacted my life, so as I said before, while I am lean which is awesome, that also means that my immunity is not as strong as someone who has a more kapha, or endomorph body type; I’m not as resilient, right? I’m a subtle, delicate little flower. But I know this; and understanding this helps me balance my life, and it helps me to quickly pivot, because I can see the imbalance now before it’s too late. But in the past when I didn’t know this, I didn’t know what I was doing to myself.

So an example of that would be; a couple of nights ago I was watching the Australian open final with Roger Federer. And I don’t watch a lot of sport, but I felt compelled to watch this, I felt like there was something beautiful unfolding. And it was a late night for me, it was totally worth watching him stand there and bawl his eyes out; it was just such a beautiful moment.

But the next day I felt totally hungover and tired, and a bit irritable because my body needs rest; I just don’t have the resilience of someone like a kapha, or even a pitta. And my constitution as a vata and pitta constitution, and I’ll talk about that more later, how you can be predominantly one, maybe two, and all of us have every dosha in us in some proportion. I’m predominantly vata but I have quite a lot of pitta in me as well. So pitta is my drive; it’s my fire. And when this is too strong, it can lead to an imbalance in my vata. It basically can burn my vata out, right?

If I go, go, go, go, my pitta is pushing, pushing, pushing, striving, striving, striving, achieving, achieving, achieving, type A personality all the way home thank you very much; that’s me! Then that is going to very quickly burn me out because my vata constitution, my predominant constitution cannot handle too much of that push, too much of that drive. So for me that means I need to be very, very careful with my lifestyle, and when I’m imbalanced I am not a very nice person. I’m not very nice to those around me, not nice to Melissa or Leo. So this for me is so important, because I become, excuse the language, I become a bit of an asshole to be honest.

Another example of this was in 2016 I was deep into the production of a movie that I’m producing, a feature film, and during that year I was drinking bulletproof coffee, right? Now coffee is very pitta, like it’s fiery, it’s dry, it dries you out from a vata perspective; it dries you out. And here I am, pushing hard, working on this movie production, managing a huge team of people, drinking bulletproof coffee, and to mix that up, I was doing a keto diet. And I’ll get into more detail why keto for me is absolute kryptonite; total disaster.

But I was angry; I was so angry, I was irritable, I was not a nice person to people around me. And I’ve apologized to people since then because I can see in hindsight, in that moment, I was so imbalanced I couldn’t even see. And why was I imbalanced? Because I ignored my intuition; I stopped listening to what I already knew about me and I started paying more attention to science, or the latest craze. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with bulletproof coffee and butter and all these sorts of things, but for me, it just does not work, full stop. It’s not good for me whatsoever.

So every time I’ve moved away from it, this has created problems in my life; that’s it, it’s that simple. So that is just a little teaser of what you can expect. I’m going to go into depth in my Ayurveda Series 1 tomorrow starting with the vata body type. Then I’ll go into pitta, and then kapha.

And I’ll talk to you about each one, the pros and cons of each one, and why it’s so important that we totally own our body type. Because trust me, while the kapha body types might sometimes long to be a bit leaner, do you know how jealous I am of your immunity and your resilience? I wish I had some of that, trust me.

So I hope you enjoyed this little teaser of Ayurveda Series 1. And you can get all the show notes for this episode at iamnickbroadhurst.com/21, and you can also get a full transcript of this show.

And please, please, please, I would be so grateful if you could leave me a 5-star review for this episode and leave me a comment, because it sort of works both ways; if you leave a comment then Apple iTunes ranks that as being more important and they will see that as popularity, and the more popular this podcast is the more people get to hear it, and I want this information out there to as many people as possible; that is my only mission, that’s it. I’ve got nothing to sell you, I’m just here to share what I’ve learned so I can help you avoid hopefully some of the mistakes or lessons that I have had to learn. Although I’m grateful for all of them, why not provide a bit of a shortcut for you?

Please do share this episode with one person or two people so this grows exponentially and thank you so much for your support. It’s so amazing to see this ranking so highly in the charts, and as always, have a beautiful day, look up, see the beauty around you, be grateful for what you have, and I love you heaps. Ciao.

I would love to hear from you, so please tag me @IAmNickBroadhurst on social media, and use the hashtag #TheNickBroadhurstShow, or leave me a comment below ( I read every single one!). And if you could take a minute to leave me a 5 star review on iTunes I would be very grateful.

6 Comments

    • You are so amazing, Nick Broadhurst! I so appreciate your honesty, vulnerability, strength, wisdom, all round awesomeness and extraordinary talent. You and Melissa are shiny bright starlight.

      Laura Plumb
      November 14, 2018
      • Thank you sista xxx

        Nick Broadhurst
        November 17, 2018
    • Hi Nick
      I have been a student of health and nutrition both informally and formally for a number of years now, and have found so much meaningful content on your and Melissa’s podcasts. I am from Canada but have wonderful memories of backpacking the east coast of your amazing country back in 2003. I lived for a month in Sydney on the North Shore and celebrated my first New Year’s in scorching heat. It would be a dream of mine to go back and explore some more.
      Thank you for diving into an explanation of the Ayurvedic Doshas….I have only recently started learning about them and finding out that I, too, am a Vata. This explains so much about my constitutional features that I questioned for so many years, comparing myself to others and wondering why my lack of resiliency to intense exercise, seemingly slower digestion and sensitive nervous system which led to a total burnout in 2007. I simply can not push myself to limits like others and I’ve become very aware of this to the point of learning how to more consciously take care of myself. Ayurveda is a deeply intelligent way of understanding the body that the western world would benefit greatly from. Thank you for the inspiring work that you both do and for helping people to take control of their health! When we know better we do better. Keep up the fantastic work!

      Lindsey
      September 21, 2019
      • Thank you Lindsey. I have also found that just like our genes, we are not always as limited by our dosha as we may think. I did an ep on this which you can listen to here. Hope that helps :)

        Nick Broadhurst
        October 19, 2019
    • Thank you so much for sharing. This has all been so helpful.

      October 27, 2022
Replying to: Cancel reply