7 Steps to Better Digestion
Get Your Digestion On!
Digestion cannot begin until all the following are present:
- Relaxed muscles in the body
- Decreased blood pressure
- Slowed pulse rate
Once these three things occur, the parasympathetic branch of the nervous system is able to fire all the correct signals to the brain saying it’s ready to get the party started. The brain then tells the stomach to up its acid production, and digestion gets going (See my blog:
Don’t Drive and Eat: It’s Bad for Digestion).
But how do you get your body into that parasympathetic state of relaxation in today’s go-go-go world? Simple: make sitting down to eat a priority. Food is the fuel for your body and it is arguably one of the most important things you do daily. If you cannot digest, you won’t have energy (among many other health issues that can occur from lack of digestion), so why make it take a back seat to whatever other task you have going on?
I know, I know. I said the answer was simple, and it is, but follow through is often the tricky part. Here are seven tips to help you digest better:
- Shop the perimeter of the grocery store. Avoid the center aisles.
- Load up your cart with produce (organic if possible--see my blog The Dirty Dozen), grass-fed and finished beef, and good ol’ dairy (as in REAL butter).
- Leave the processed items on their shelves or snug firmly in their freezer boxes.
- When you buy good ingredients and actually cook meals for yourself and your family, you will appreciate eating much more.
- Check out my blog Good, Better and Best: How to Navigate Your Grocery Store
- Bring your appetite, as long as it’s not out of control.
- If you’re ravenous when you get to the table, you will likely overeat as you are more concerned about getting food into your stomach than the actual amount of food going in. It takes about 20 minutes for the “full” signal to get from the stomach to the brain.
- Don’t skip meals.
- Eat a small, healthy snack if you’re not going to make it. Small being the key word there.
- Less, then more (if desired).
- The “old way of thinking” often promotes a clean plate, no matter how much food is on it. Therefore, an overloaded plate can easily lead to an overloaded stomach. You can always add more to your plate if you still feel hungry when finished.
- If you have the problem of bigger eyes than stomach, try using a smaller plate (nine inches or less). You can’t put as much food on a plate that isn’t as big!
- Be mindful of what’s on your plate.
- Did you or someone prepare it for you? Either way, how great was that!
- Is the presentation nice? Or goofy? Or messy?
- Isn’t it great that you actually have food on your plate?
- Use all five senses while eating.
- What does it look like?
- How does it smell?
- How does it taste?
- What is the texture like?
- Does it make any noises when you chew (crunch, squeek, slurp)?
- Eat small bites.
- When you take smaller bites, you are more likely to avoid the risk of gulping air as you eat. Air bubbles in your gastrointestinal tract can be painful and sometimes embarrassing depending on which end they decide to come out.
- Also, the smaller the bite, the longer the food will last. This will help you enjoy the meal more thoroughly, and help the body get a better sense of fullness instead of leading to overeating.
- Chew well.
- The recommended number of times to chew one mouthful of food is between 20 and 40. Sound like a lot? Probably because you’ve been doing it wrong your whole life.
- When you take time to chew, you really get a better idea of what you’re eating.
- Again, the more you chew, the less you will likely eat because you will actually feel full when you truly are.
Basically, everything above is pointing toward one key suggestion: SLOW DOWN! The American culture says it’s a waste of time to eat when you could be getting 8 million other things done (or doing them at the same time). Give this “enjoying your food” thing a try. You might be surprised by the results.
Source:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/8-steps-to-mindful-eating
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Heidi Toy Functional Medicine Blog
Did you know most people didn’t have refrigerators in their homes until well into the 1900’s? It wasn’t even invented for large scale commercial use until the mid 1800’s [1]. So how did people keep their milk cold and make their food last longer? Fermentation. It sounds like a gross concept, because we often associate fermentation with a bad odor, but foods like cheese, yogurt, sauerkraut and pickles are all fermented foods. And those aren’t gross, are they? Well, some might disagree with me about sauerkraut, but that’s beside the point. Fermented foods are digestive aids. Microscopic living organisms in fermented foods help extend the food’s shelf life, enhance flavor, and help the body absorb minerals. These organisms pre-digest the food, getting rid of harmful components, and create more vitamins and enzymes than the food began with. Enzyme-rich foods have many benefits including [2]: Increase digestibility of food we eat Boost immune system Increase alkalinity; neutralizing pH levels Provide a healthy balance of friendly flora in the gut (Learn more about your microbiome in my other blog posts ) Tone the colon and help with elimination Control cravings for unhealthier foods Eliminate toxins and undigested wastes in the body In the “old days,” people use to ferment all kinds of foods through pickling, canning, pasteurization and added salt. Nowadays, however, large scale fermentation has lost many of its nutritious benefits due to the need for speed to get the product on the shelf as fast as possible and as cheap as possible. The only true fermented foods you will find are sauerkraut, kombucha, yogurt and kefir, beans, wine and beer, some meats (such as salami and pastrami), legumes and nuts (such as tofu, soy sauce and miso), sourdough bread, and various kinds of vegetables [3]. Fun facts about sauerkraut: The Germans “stole” it from the Chinese! Sauerkraut (probably not labeled as such for the Chinese, but the same recipe) was one of the main foods for those who built the Great Wall of China. Genghis Khan brought it to Eastern Europe during an invasion. It also contains high levels of vitamin C, and sailors often took it on long journeys to prevent scurvy.
How can we best keep blood sugar stable? Do what our body is designed to do – use fat for energy. Our species did not survive the Ice Age because of vanilla coffee lattes and cheesecake. Throughout most of our history, we ate a diet that was likely 50-70 percent fat. Look at the old family photo albums, specifically pictures of people in the first half of the 1900s, before we had so many processed foods. You won’t see many fat people--in fact, most look darn skinny. If they lived on the farm, they ate lots of eggs, meat, milk, and vegetables out of their own backyards. “Diet foods” were non-existent. Heart disease was almost non-existent. Our metabolism is designed to work much better with fats better than with sugar. Fats provide the slow and steady fuel our body likes to use for energy. Think of fats as a slow-burning log on the fire. One log (i.e. one meal containing fats) lasts for hours. Starchy carbs, on the flip side, are like kindling. You constantly have to throw more twigs (chips, pasta, bagels) to keep the fire burning. The first step is to know your sugars by reading the labels, and then avoid said sugars as much as possible.
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Omega-3 and Omega-6 are considered “essential” fatty acids because they cannot be produced by the body--we get them from the food we eat. They are biologically active upon ingestion, which means the body utilizes them right away and cannot store them up for later. They are essential because they help with both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory responses.
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