Concious Food Behaviour
Step 1: Slow eating
Experience the benefits of the "Eating Slow" habit 🍽
Most people eat quickly. Very fast. We rarely take the time to enjoy our food… or sometimes even chew it properly. But learning to eat slowly is one of the simplest yet most effective habits to improve your overall health. ☝️
Remember the folk wisdom: "He who chews for a long time, lives for a long time." People seem to have always known this.
Slow food has significant advantages:
The brain needs about 20 minutes from the start of a meal to send satiety signals. Imagine the extra calories you could be consuming simply because you didn't give your body time to realize it no longer needed food. Now imagine how those extra calories affect your weight.
Eating slowly also helps us feel more satisfied, which is different from just filling our stomachs.
When you slow down, savor your food, pay attention to taste and texture, and appreciate each conscious bite, you leave the table satisfied…even if you ate a sandwich.
Think of digestion as a chain reaction. As soon as we see, smell or think about food, we begin to salivate to meet the food in our mouths. Saliva contains enzymes that break down food and moistens the mouth to make swallowing easier.
Meanwhile, the stomach begins to secrete more acid, and the small intestine begins to prepare for peristalsis. And so on. If we rush this process, we will force our gastrointestinal tract to work with tension.
Most studies on this topic show that eating slowly helps you eat less. This will help you lose or maintain weight. And another interesting fact: after eating slowly, the feeling of hunger comes an hour later than if you ate your lunch quickly.
Eating slowly means less food, but longer satisfaction.
One of the side benefits of eating slowly is that it increases water intake during meals. Some studies say that drinking more water may be the key to helping us eat less at meals.
Water reduces the feeling of hunger and leads to a higher level of satiety between meals.
Most of us lead busy, fast-paced lives, so it's very natural that we try to speed up our meals. But fast food does us no good.
When we eat too quickly, we eat more than we need, which leads to poor digestion, weight gain, and decreased satisfaction with food.
❗️ Slow food, on the contrary, contributes to better digestion, easier weight maintenance and much greater satisfaction from food.
What diet is the best? 🥗
How would you describe your eating style? Are you a member of this "dietary camp": paleo, vegan, LCHF, keto, what else?
Really, there is no single, absolutely best diet for everyone and forever.
Body type, taste, income income, organic products or food, knowledge about eating, time limitations, family, stress balance, job, food availability, culinary preferences.
Can you grasp the diversity and see the big picture from above?
Possibly, up to this moment you’ve experimented with a specific way of eating, and it’s wonderful.
But let’s admit, what worked for you at that moment of your life might not work for everyone?
Physiologically, the human body can function well with multiple ways of eating and supplies of nutrients.
It was clearly demonstrated on the basis of the traditional diet of eating that different tribes and ethnic groups in the world have.
For example, arctic eskimos and African masses eat traditional diets with a lot of high fat and protein and a small number of vegetables.
Inhabitants of the island of Kitava in the middle part of the Pacific Ocean are fed a traditional diet with low fat, but also high in vegetables and starchy carbohydrates.
Residents of Tokelau near New Zealand enjoy a traditional diet with an even higher amount of fat.
And all of them are healthy with minimal symptoms of heart disease, stroke, diabetes, inflammation, obesity.
It is possible because human organisms easily adapt to different types of food.
You can be healthy and energized regardless of whether it is mostly meat or vegetables, fat or carbohydrates, many meals a day or a few times a month.
It means that you should be open to testing and evaluating multiple ways that can work for you, and easily recognize what doesn't work. If you strongly believe in the “religion of eating”, then as a result you become focused on yourself or on your special thoughts about it and start ignoring your own physiological and psychological needs.
But how do such different food diets really work?
Really they are not as different as you might think. Most food programs share a lot in common.
All of them work in similar way:
🥑 Promote paying attention to food
Studies show that if you pay attention to what you eat, then you start burning fat, losing weight and improving your health in general.
No matter what you are focused on: paleo, organic, carnivore, vegetarian. All these bring results.
🥑 Focus on the quality of food products
Paleo followers want to have little carbohydrates, so you start choosing a whole food, animal diet, so you can get more protein, fat and minimally processed food.
Vegan diets is high in carbohydrates, they try to eat more plants, to get more cellulose, antioxidants and minimally processed.
Do you see what’s in common? Whole minimally processed foods.
🥑 Help to use the deficit of nutrients
Obviously, food programs help us to move away from high level processed food and eat more whole, minimally processed products, in which there are more nutrients.
🥑 Help control your appetite and satiety
If we better understand what food provides satiety, we tend to choose more quality products and eventually we eat way less. We feel satisfied. We use stored fat, we gain more muscles and move more.
By the way, you don’t need to count calories. Knowledge about food and the quality of products is enough to normalize your hunger and appetite.That means calorie control without calorie counting.
When you start working on eating habits, eventually you think about physical activity. Indeed, a many diets recommend regular physical activity.
Regular activity of high and low intensity helps digestion. It uses food to build muscles rather than store fat.
Now it becomes clear that different diets (at first glance are based on antagonistic ideas) can provide health, create a beautiful body and provide longevity.
I will not impose on you a single philosophy of eating. Vegans can stay vegans, and if you like paleo, you can eat your protein. There is no need to change.
Our foundation is creating habits. And that's more important than limitations created with diets mindset.
In this approach we step by step create new behaviors that will become your second nature.
Through this lense, the best diet, which you really need to follow, is the one that best fits you. 😊
