Spring Qi Chats | Week 13
From mouth to anus…
This week we discuss gut motility.
Get in my belly!!
When most of us see food we think of one thing - getting the delicious meal into our tummies. But many of use forget the mechanics, physiological and neurological components that will help you DIGEST that food that’s now sitting in your tummy. And you may have been doing yourself a disservice from your very 1st bite. Let’s go over the IMPORTANT skill and habit of mastication, aka chewing your food!
CHEW YOUR FOOD
How you eat is going to help you digest your food. So whenever we chew food more thoroughly, it actually takes longer for us to eat it. It changes the satiety factor. So for a lot of people using the two simple strategies of putting their fork down in between bites and chewing their food a little bit longer is actually enough to shift how your digestion. But there’s other ways that you can dive deeper into how you can ACTUALLY chew your food and not just hear it then continue with old, poor chewing habits.
Our satiety signals need time to process. Your first satiety signal is alerted from the stretched stomach, alerting that you should stop eating, but now it's the food's being chewed up and digested and it's moving into the small intestine, now the vagal receptors in the small intestine begin to recognize nutrient traveling to the gut. So it IS about chewing your food to help with gut motility.
Neuro-Qi Tip o’the day!
Slow it down!
TIME: Taking the time for eating and not being rushed
TEXTURE: Chewing your food so you can feel the texture of the food change as your saliva and masticated food becomes the ‘bolus’
TINY: Take smaller bites! I love eating with chop sticks, using smaller utensils and cutting your food smaller so you don’t have to swallow a chunk of carrot as you’re chewing on the rest!
*Video posts every Friday by 11:30am MDT
