There is a small, unglamorous instruction in the classical texts that almost nobody follows, and it is probably the single most useful thing in the whole of ritucharya.
It is called ritu-sandhi — the seam between two seasons. Seven days at the end of the outgoing season, seven at the start of the incoming one. Across those fourteen days you are meant to taper: drop the old regimen a quarter at a time, take up the new one the same way. Change everything on the first cold morning and you get what the texts politely call sandhi-ja vyadhi — the illnesses born of the join.
Which is, if you think about your own history of falling ill, suspiciously familiar. Most people do not get sick in deep winter. They get sick in the fortnight when winter starts.
So this issue is not about what to eat. It is about how to change what you eat.
Shishira is the cold, clear, dry stretch after the deepest winter. Your digestive fire is still at its annual peak — genuinely strong, strong enough that the texts permit the heaviest eating of the year. And underneath that, Kapha is beginning to accumulate, quietly and without symptoms, banking the load it will release in spring.
Both of those facts matter later. For the next fortnight, only one thing matters: move gently from what you were doing to what comes next.