The digestive process starts with your thoughts and it needs water to support it. Now let’s just talk a little bit about how it goes through the body.
You put something in your mouth and you chew it, then you swallow, it goes down your esophagus, goes into your stomach, there it moves to your intestines and out the bowels. OK that’s simplified, but I want you to get the basic idea that there is a beginning and an end and it’s pretty much a tube that goes through the body.
That is the picture I want you to have in your mind, maybe think of a straw. It has an opening at the top and it has an opening at the bottom, something goes in the top and it comes out the bottom. This brings us to tip number 3.
Our current culture encourages us to eat more often than our bodies can handle . We generally need a minimum of a 12 hour fast each day to completely process what we have consumed that day.
That means if you eat at 8 PM then you won’t eat anything else until after 8 AM the next day that’s reasonable right?
Maybe it is reasonable but I have found it’s not so easy for me to change my habits! I was a middle of the night eater and I struggled to get my body to be content with a twelve hour fast daily.
You want to eat slowly so that you don’t overfill the tube, allowing your mind to catch up with the body. You also want to eat at one sitting and then you want to stop for a few hours to digest completely. Remember to drink your water during the hours you are not eating.
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We have two parts to our autonomic nervous system. There is the parasympathetic which is rest and digest and there is the sympathetic which can be described as fight, flight or freeze. When we eat we always want to be in the parasympathetic system. We want our bodies to be resting and calm so that the digestive process has all the energy it needs to digest. After the work of making a meal for the family we may not be in a calm state. Taking a few minutes to breathe deeply or express gratitude and really feel it, will calm our bodies down and get our body into the rest and digest system before we consume.
Let’s talk next about water. Every step of the digestive process needs water, the saliva needs water, our gastric juices need water to create the enzymes we need for digestion, our stomachs need water to produce the mucus for the lining, our intestines definitely need water their process flora and of course if you have ever been constipated you know your bowels need water.
We need about half of our body weight in ounces of water daily. So if you are 150 pounds you need 75 ounces of water.
And also it is good to drink the water between meals to keep your stomach acid strong. Ideally a half an hour before a meal and then up to two hours after a meal you would avoid drinking. So this goes back to the rule that everyone tells you, when you first get up in the morning drink a big glass of water. How else are you going to get those 75 ounces in? But if you start with a nice 8 ounce glass of water right away and then maybe get another one or two in before your first meal you could ideally be a third of the way there.
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