Evolution of Love 2

Eating Habits

Growing up, if your parents were anything like mine, all you heard from them was to finish everything on your plate 👈.

Well, I’m going to advise you to do the opposite. Let your stomachs decide whether to finish or to leave unfinished.

(Bless my dear mother in heaven, for keeping her patience with the slow picky eater that I was!)

I recently posted about how eating slowly and mindfully helped me reach my goal weight while including all my favourite foods. If you read that post and have actually taken the first step to “slow down” while eating, you’ll discover that when you eat slowly & mindfully, you feel fuller much sooner & with lesser food.

This is because, our stomachs have natural stretch receptors that, well, receive the stretch signals as the stomach stretches with food and gets full. But, the receptors need a little time to send their ‘fullness’ signal to the brain - about 20 minutes ⏰. So, you can binge-eat to double your stomach’s capacity (after all they’re built to even stretch to up to 6 times their normal capacity!) and still not “feel” full, if you’ve not yet hit the magical 20 minutes. After which, of course, you may end up feeling like a sick, belching, bloated buffalo 🐃🥴.

Our bodies are the best guide for “how much” food we really need. Without any frills or fancies of a calorie-counting app, your body will “allow you” to eat a little bit more if you’re physically active, and if you have a sedentary lifestyle/job with little movement, you’ll find yourself feeling pretty satisfied on less food. We just need to slow down to hear the 🎼“I’m satisfied & how! Let’s stop eating now!”🎼 tune that our stomach plays 20 mins into each meal.

So, coming back to the plate, I often find that, once I slow down and eat mindfully, even if the food is extremely tasty & I wouldn’t actually mind eating more, I just hear my stomach protest silently. And then I want to be kind to my stomach and to myself😇.

If that means that sometimes I have to leave some food on the plate, I do it 🤷‍♀️. Like this quarter of a sandwich that didn't find it's way into my tummy at breakfast today. Without guilt. I save it for my next meal, refrigerate it or sometimes just put it in a cow-food pile that we have here in Rajpur (thanks to all our house-help having cows in their house - perks of small town life!).

In our fast-paced multi-tasking distracted lives, we’ve forgotten HOW to listen to our bodies, our stomachs in particular. Our tummies are still sending their fullness cues. But they don’t have a listener anymore.

It takes time, practice, and patience (and sometimes, access to a Nutrition Coach like me 😉) to develop the fullness awareness through slow eating. And when you do, you have to honour it. By stopping the eating. As soon as you “feel” full. Regardless of the food left on your plate.
Maybe next time you’ll just take a smaller first helping?