[00:00.0]
Hello and welcome to the Own I'm Cindy Lynne and I can't wait to help you step into your health power. Today we're going to do another in the series of let's Get Started. And it's let's get started on digestion. So digestion can be one of those things that impacts your entire life.
[00:19.3]
That sounds melodramatic, but it's not really. If you have trouble with indigestion, if you have trouble processing foods, if you have trouble with your stomach, if certain foods give you problems, you know what it's like to have digestive issues.
[00:35.8]
There's another side to it though, and that is there's very often times where we don't experience the immediate symptoms of food not digesting properly. But when we don't have good, strong digestion, we're not able to actually extract the nutrients that we need from the food for our bodies.
[01:00.1]
So we can have downstream digestive problems that really aren't as obvious right away. We can have a great diet and still be malnourished if our body can't use what we bring into it.
[01:16.7]
So today we're going to talk about a couple of ways that really make a difference. And you can implement these changes immediately and without a whole lot of extra effort because there are things you're already doing.
[01:32.9]
So the first of these is chewing. And I know we've all heard it chew 20 times. Chew your food, chew your food. But how many of us actually do it? So I'm not a fan of the counting. I think that mealtime should be, stress free.
[01:49.3]
It should be a relaxed time. And in fact, our body's ability to rest and digest only happens if we are not in the fight or flight state. So we should always eat in a very calm environment.
[02:05.8]
And when, we do that, we're able to take a little bit more time and pay a little bit more attention to what's actually going on with the food. When we chew enough, when we chew properly to start the digestive process, we end up doing something that, has roots and Ayurveda.
[02:25.8]
And that is if you've, you've maybe heard the expression to drink your solids and chew your liquids. And this basically is a way of saying that when we consume something solid, when we take a, bite of meat or salad, potatoes, whatever it may be, that we want to chew that mouthful until it's actually in a liquid state.
[02:49.9]
And this is going to be accomplished by the physical breakdown by our teeth as well as incorporating our saliva, into the food so that we end up with a liquid. Now, this is not typically what happens.
[03:05.5]
I can tell you exactly how I used to eat, and if I'm not mindful, continue to do. I will take a mouthful, I will chew, I will swallow part of the food. I'll continue to chew some more and then swallow what I can of that.
[03:21.7]
And there's actually more solid pieces. And if you've ever had the feeling that something's kind of stuck in your throat, that's because there's solid pieces going where liquid should be going. Chewing our food until it becomes liquid also means that we'll have enough of our saliva, enough of the enzyme amylase, for example, mixed in with the food to start the digestive process.
[03:48.1]
Because it actually starts in the mouth. It's not something that happens just in the stomach. Our digestive process starts in the mouth with these enzymes, and it starts the breakdown of carbohydrates. And it also signals the body that, hey, there's something coming.
[04:07.5]
There's food coming down. Prepare to digest. We can experience this sometimes if we smell something really good. If we walk into the kitchen and we smell a familiar, wonderful, food that we really enjoy, and your mouth literally waters.
[04:25.1]
That's your salivary gland starting the digestive process before the food even gets to your mouth. It may not even be to your plate yet. So it's a very important step in the process that we all too often bypass by chewing very quickly and swallowing before the food is ready.
[04:43.6]
So chew your solids, Chew that single mouthful. It's until it's very liquid. Swallow that mouthful and then take the next. So what about liquids? What about smoothies or protein shakes? These kinds of things? I often hear that people aren't satisfied from them, or they just don't leave them feeling full or they leave them feeling bloated.
[05:04.5]
And that's very often because we bypass this whole process. We can take a drink and swallow with food barely hitting our tongue, let alone spending time in our mouth in order to stop that, to start that process. So if we are having things like a smoothie, liquid things.
[05:21.4]
Go ahead and take a mouthful, move that around your mouth, move it around your tongue. Experience the full taste of your food. That's part of the benefit of having that liquid, having it moving around in your mouth is that we can taste more.
[05:37.0]
And then after that liquid has been in your mouth, you can sense somewhat more diluted. Go ahead and swallow that mouthful and then take another. Another aspect to having this liquid in our mouth when we chew is that it does enhance the pleasure of the food.
[05:53.6]
It enhances the taste of the food. And in fact, it can make you feel more satisfied because your brain registers all of that taste, all of that flavor. Your brain has time to register that there's actually food coming into the body. And that's also part of that relaxed eating environment, part of bringing mindfulness to your eating.
[06:15.8]
So I would encourage you this week, sometime when you're eating alone, to experiment with chewing, to experiment with actually drinking your solids and chewing your liquids and see how that feels, see how different it is.
[06:33.9]
See how easy it is for me to say and how challenging it is to complete, especially if we're in a hurry, if we're, you, know, running behind, if we're eating on the run, which is not the best habit anyways, but it all happens.
[06:49.1]
We can, however, make a huge impact, make a huge difference in our digestion when we chew and when we start that process in our mouth where it's supposed to start. Now, this has a little bit of overlap with the episode where we talked about drinking when to drink water, because we said drinking with meals was not the best idea.
[07:12.7]
And we talked about how would actually drinking water or really any beverage can dilute the digestive juices and result in poor digestion. The other time that it's a bit of a challenge when we drink while we're eating is if instead of having our saliva moisten and liquefy the food as we're chewing it, we wash the food down with water.
[07:36.9]
So it accomplishes the same task in terms of the ability to get the food out of our mouth and down into our stomach. But it bypasses some important steps and actually decreases our ability to digest and to derive nutrients from the food that we have eaten.
[07:59.2]
So washing food down, not a good idea. Chewing our food using our own saliva is going to make a huge difference in our ability to get nutrients to actually make the food work for our body.
[08:14.3]
I hope this has been helpful. I encourage you to give this a try. If you're used to eating with folks who eat in a hurry, who are chewing quickly or rarely, and swallowing and washing foods down with water, they might find this intriguing.
[08:33.2]
May want to do this experiment. So feel free to share this episode and subscribe as well, because there will be more on these let's Get Started series. Like I said, it's important to be able to do tweaks to things we're already doing without adding endless numbers of things to our.
[08:51.4]
To our to do list to. Oh, my gosh. I have to remember to do this now. Now, I strive to bring mindfulness and to have our bodies work the way they're intended, because that's the absolute foundation of health. So until next week, let's go out and own it.
