Episode 2: The Art of Slowing Down – Get More Bang For Your Buck From Your Plate

Hi. Welcome to Genie Nutrition Secret Number Two. My name's Angie White. I'm a Health Detective, Functional Diagnostic Nutrition Practitioner, Bio-hacking geek and I love helping people to take back control of their health.

Welcome back. Last week's secret was around the art of listening. If you've not caught up on the first episode, it's definitely worth the listen and I'd love to read your comments. Feel free to post them in the comments field, which you'll find at http://genienutrition.com/secret1. This week's secret, is around the art of slowing down. Now as an FDN practitioner, I often refer to, what we call, DRESS for Health Success. As I mentioned last week, DRESS stands for Diet, Rest, Exercise, Stress reduction and Supplementation.

Now as a health detective/FDN practitioner/health coach, what I really specialise in and what I focus in on with clients is around the stress reduction piece. Now a big part of the issues that I see people suffering from, whether it be digestive issues or energy issues, mood problems, quite often it comes down to the low level chronic stress response that people are suffering from. Often that's caused by their mealtime process that they go through.

Whether it's caused by the actual foods that they're physically eating, whether it's foods that they're sensitive to or maybe just that they're worried about eating a certain food. So if you've got this idea that actually eating chocolate is the worst thing ever, and every time you eat it, you worry about the fact that you are eating it, or that you're not gonna be able to stop eating it, then that, in itself, could create a stress response or even just being in a stressed state whilst you're eating.

You might be working on something that you've got to meet a deadline for and you literally feel like you don't have time to stop, so you're eating your lunch whilst you're stressed about the deadline that you've got to meet. All of these different areas around food can really impact the body in terms of creating this stress response and also just that being often underlying, ongoing stress. Usually we eat around three times a day if not more. You can imagine if you're creating that ongoing stressor, it's not gonna be helping us to achieve the health goals that we all have.

What I really want to talk about, this week, is specifically around what we can do to reduce that stress response that we're getting specifically around the meal times. One of the common issues that I see is with the speed of eating. Eating fast is very, very common. If I was to ask you if you were a fast eater or a slow eater, I would say a very, very large percentage of people would probably say that they were a fast eater. It's not uncommon. It's not wrong. It's just how it is.

The reality is, though, by eating fast, we're just not giving our digestive system a chance to actually process the food that we're taking in. Although your actual digestive tract starts in the mouth, when you actually take something in, the taste of it, the chewing of it really starts before that. Really, the first step is to start to actually acknowledge what is it you're eating, what does it look like, what does it smell like. Just enjoy it before you even take the food into your mouth, okay?

Take some deep breaths before you actually start eating. Just breathe deep into your belly. We'll talk about breathing and deep belly breaths, etc., in future episodes. But just for now, just literally take a deep breath in through your nose and then out through your mouth, maybe three or four of them just to slow things down. When you start eating, just try to slow things, start to chew a bit more than what you normally would do. If you'd usually take maybe two or three minutes to eat your meal, just try and make it last, say, 10 minutes. Whatever it is that you usually do, just try to extend it a bit longer so that you're really giving yourself the best chance to actually absorb the nutrients from the amazing meal that you're eating.

If it's not amazing meal, if you know that it's not full of nutrients, it's still worth slowing down. The more you slow down ... Even if it was, say, a McDonald's burger you were having, just don't eat it whilst you're driving. Just stop the car, take it in, smell it, absorb it, enjoy it. It doesn't have to be the perfect meal. We can't always be eating the most nutritious meals every single day, every single meal, so just enjoy the process of eating and let your body absorb the maximum amount of nutrients that it can do from that meal, okay?

Your task this week is really just around awareness and how fast do you eat. Just as I say, try slowing down, turn off the TV, take some deep breaths and just try as much as you possibly can to avoid eating whilst you're distracted. You might also want to check out the CALM App. It's available, certainly, on iPhone. I believe on Android as well. Give that a go.

That's it for this week. I hope that's been helpful. Next week, we'll go into a bit more detail with another secret, which will really help you to form the skills that you need to become your very own health detective. But thank you for listening. If you have any comments that you'd like to share, or if you have any questions, post them in the comments field, which you can find at http://genienutrition.com/secret2 along with the transcribe of this podcast. If you'd like to rate us on Genie Nutrition Secrets in iTunes, that would be amazing. Have a great week and that's it for now. Thank you very much.