Why Your Eating Pace is Crushing Your Weight Loss + Health Goals

 

In getting away from nutritional science (as I often do) and focusing more on changing your “relationship with food” as the big juicy pathway to the weight loss and balanced health pot of gold, let’s focus on one of the power areas of “relationship with food” to kick off your year;
HOW you eat.


There’s lots to talk about with the “HOW” you eat conversation.  Today we’ll focus on one little part; your PACE.

Here’s a real easy way to understand PACE:

Are you a slow or fast eater?
And, under what conditions are you eating?

Eating pace – whether you’re physically eating fast or slow, and under what conditions that’s happening in – is a crucial element of HOW food is taken in.  And what you’re doing as the eater taking in the food (ie. how you eat) greatly affects the power of that food in your body, regardless of what the food actually is.

Why does eating pace matter?
Why does it have an influence over your bottom line of weight, health and mental balance?

First, your eating speed directly affects digestion.  Then the second tier effects influence your health and weight.

I’m sure you already know that when you eat fast you simply don’t digest well.
Why is that?

If you’re physically eating at a fast pace, there’s a lot that’s NOT happening.

The first thing that’s not happening when you eat fast is that you don’t start to chemically break down the food in your mouth, which is actually the very important first step of digestion. Your saliva is designed to begin the process of chemically dissolving the food to then allow it to get as most efficiently assimilated by your stomach and small intestine as possible, which is where it goes next, after your mouth.

If you eat fast, you don’t chew very much. You kind of just gulp and push that food down.

If you don’t chew, your saliva can’t do it’s job. And if your saliva is not doing it’s job, you are literally bypassing the entire first step of how nature wanted you to use and assimilate food.

The most immediate and obvious negative effect of this is that your body gets a little mad at you for gulping and shoving and not chewing.

It shows you how mad it is by the level of bloating, gas and discomfort you will then feel!  The belly pops out, the smelly gas starts because the food was not properly broken down and instead sits and ferments in your intestines, and you generally feel like a low-energy sack of poo as a result.

So there’s a direct effect on your health, and believe it or not, this also will greatly affect your weight.

If this kind of pattern goes on consistently, month after month, year after year, it is highly likely you’ll have more fat on your body than if you were eating slow and chewing.

Ok, so that’s the first bit of what’s not happening when you eat fast that contributes to poor digestion.
But wait, there’s more!

There are more things NOT happening when you eat fast that greatly affect your digestive power.


If you’re eating fast, it’s highly likely you’re not:

  • Seeing the food and allowing visual pleasure cues to resonate
  • Tasting all the flavors. Now chewing = no tasting.If you don’t chew, and have some time to hold that food on your tongue, you can’t really taste.
  • Smelling the food’s aroma
  • Registering any sense of pleasure from what you’re eating
  • Registering any sense of overall satisfaction from what you just ate

 

Without these elements in your eating experience, you could be cutting your digestive power by 40-60%!

So, by eating fast you’re not allowing yourself to see, taste, smell, feel pleasure or satisfaction, and if all that doesn’t happen, the food that just got taken in is going to act very differently in your body than if it was strongly digested with all those elements.

A concrete example of this is sugar.

If you eat something with higher amounts of sugar in it and you see it, taste it, enjoy it, get pleasure, chew it so your saliva breaks it down your chances are very high that the sugar in that food will get assimilated efficiently (i.e. strong digestive power) and as a result, may be used by your body quickly to be burned up for energy. Conversely, if you don’t have all those experiences I just mentioned, that sugar will not be digested as efficiently and cleanly, and as a result, your body may do something very different with it instead, like store it as fat instead of using it quickly for energy.

That’s a pretty strong direct connection with eating pace and your bottom line, the amount of fat on your hips or not!

So, my point here with eating pace is that the goal to assist you in ending your food war and creating the peaceful, stress-free happy relationship with food you want often involves the need to eat slower. When most people check in with this idea, and they’re honest, they see that indeed they’ve been eating pretty fast as a pattern.

I know it’s not so simple to just turn this around in a snap simply because you’re hearing all the smart reasons for why you should eat slower.

So my tip – start very slow, and with one “mealtime” as practice.

Maybe start just by playing with slowing down at breakfast.

Take 5 extra minutes to breathe, smell, chew .. and just BE with your food.

It may surprise you how pleasurable this practice can be!

 

 

 

 

 

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