Chew More, Eat Less, Live a Healthy Life!

How you chew your food can go a long way to helping you control the amount of food you eat. Busy lifestyles often result in eating foods of lower nutritional value while you are on the go, which has consequences in terms of your weight. Observing some simple eating rules can help you chew your food more effectively and lose weight.

Chewing Food

The problem with the way most people chew their food is that it is done too fast. According to the Health Link BC website, it takes up to 20 minutes for your brain to get the signal that your stomach is full. During that 20-minute period, it is easy to consume portions you don't need. Westchester University of Pennsylvania suggests chewing your food 30 to 50 times per mouthful. This will help slow you down, and mix the food thoroughly with saliva to help digestion.

Portion Sizes

Modifying your portion sizes will help support your efforts to chew your foods more slowly. According to the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention, people will consume more food at a sitting if the size of the portion is larger. Using smaller plates, so the plate still seems full, or just adding less to the plate, may help you eat less.

If you’re digesting your food better, does that mean that you get more nutrition from it? Yes!  Longer chewing has been shown to increase the amount of protein your body can absorb from foods and put to use building muscle.  It also makes some vitamins and minerals more available for absorption—especially from uncooked fruits and vegetables.

By eating fast what you are doing is:

• Forcing your stomach and intestine to work harder and prolong the time it needs to digest food.
• Create problems of constipation
• Bad digestion due to lack of secretion of enzymes.
• Feel digestive discomfort.

By doing it right:

• You start a good chemical process that separate good substances with toxic ones by mixing salivary enzymes with food.
• Fullness feeling is achieved faster, therefore this can be beneficial to you if you want fitness.
• You will enjoy the taste of one of the pleasures of life.

Enjoy your meal. Use your senses to be delighted by food. See that splendid fruit, smell the steam of a recent prepared sauce, taste that sweet flavor of a dessert and hear that crunchy sound when your teeth make their work.

You can practice to set your internal clock to make the rhythm of chewing an average of 35 times.