Importance of how to eat

“The way you eat not only decides your physical health, but the very way you think, feel and experience life” ~ Sadhguru

In today’s world we are more conscious about what we eat than we used to one hundred years ago. But how we eat is just as important as what we eat. Given the fast paced way of life we live today we normally don’t pay much attention to the way we eat, most of the time we just need to eat to get back to work, but do we notice how this is affecting our health?

Has it ever happened that, after eating a meal, if we get agitated our digestion seems to slow down? We might even get a stomach ache or just end up having some trouble digesting the food that we just ate. The same thing could happen if we eat hastily. When we eat in a hurry we might tend to not chew the food the proper amount of times, this could put stress on our digestive system. In yoga it is said that we must chew our food at least twenty four times, or to make it so that when we swallow the food it should be almost like a paste. This allows for a big part of the digestive process to happen actively in the mouth and allows the stomach to finish the digestion more quickly and for the food to be more easily absorbed. In modern science, eating in a hurry has been associated with eating more food and obesity because we are not giving the body enough time to process the amount of food we are eating, hence we tend to eat more. Overeating and not chewing the food properly could also cause gastritis in some individuals as the stomach lining is likely to be exposed for more time to the gastric acid.

Digestive problems are not the only issues that might arise from eating hastily. The faster we eat, the more food we are likely to eat. This means that there will be more glucose in our body at a given time and in consequence the more insulin the body will need to release in order to handle the meal. These insulin spikes could in turn, in the long run, contribute to insulin resistance which might develop into diabetes. Insulin could also contribute to other health risks like metabolic syndrome, which is a group of conditions that can increase the risks of cardiovascular disease.

No one has to tell you how important food is because you know how it feels to go twelve or twenty four hours without food.  So, you know its importance. But we need to understand and be conscious about the importance of how we eat and how it can affect us.