Makes a lot of sense doesn’t it? The same place where food is digested and most of our nutrients are absorbed into our bodies is also one of the most important places in our bodies.
Don’t get me wrong, all of our body systems work together to keep us healthy and there is no single system that deserves our full attention when we are struggling with any health problem. Unfortunately, that is one of the main pieces of a puzzle that Western medicine seems to be missing.
Did you know that the way you eat matters as much as what you eat?
Digestion is a parasympathetic process. Which means that our bodies have been created to put digestion on hold when there is stress in our lives and our “fight or flight” response has been activated.
For those of us who suffer from anxiety, stress, and a crazy lifestyle on a regular basis, our food can hardly be digested.
This can cause a lot of problems like:
Deficiency in a variety of nutrients.
Obesity
Anxiety
Depression
Inflammation
And the list goes on.
Fact: The same part of the brain that triggers stress also turns off digestion.
If you are looking to lose weight, many times, the slower we eat the faster we metabolize our food.
If we want to begin to heal our body, we have to start investigating more about what we eat, and also looking at how we eat.
These simple steps can help you start to heal your body in important ways, simply by changing your eating habits.
Step 1 – Sit down to eat. Just relax. Don’t eat at the races – Our lifestyle keeps us in a sympathetic (nervous) state. Your sympathetic state is your flight or fight response. If you are nice you are not digesting anything.
Step 2 – Chew your food well. Everybody. Put the fork down between bites. Take the time to eat. Swallowing large chunks makes it difficult for the stomach to digest. Your saliva is supposed to start breaking down your food.
Step 3 – Make sure you are getting adequate hydrochloric acid. Supplement with fermented foods, herbal foods, and possibly only lightly cooked foods for a while to give your digestive tract a short break.
Step 4 – Be careful with your gallbladder. Eating good fats will stimulate the release of hydrochloric acid in the stomach, and make sure the bile salts in the gallbladder are working as they should. Suitable fats may include free-range butter (ghee is better), cold-pressed nut and seed oils, coconut oil, and if you eat meat, try to make it from a hormone-free free-range animal or better not. eat at all.
Step 5 – Eliminate highly processed and refined foods from your diet such as sugar, white flour, avoid dairy products, sodas and fried foods.
These steps can begin the healing process in the body for almost any health ailment.