Body Science
Body Science
Body Science
Body Science
All About Eating Slowly
Why You Should Care About Eating Slowly
Eating slowly is a game-changer. It’s good for digestion, helps with weight control, and leaves you feeling more satisfied with each meal. On the other hand, rushing through your food leads to poor digestion, weight gain, and lower meal satisfaction. Sound familiar? If you’re blowing through meals like a drive-thru addict, you’re missing out on some serious benefits.
The takeaway? Slow down, enjoy your food, and give your body a chance to thank you.
The Benefits of Eating Slowly
When you eat slowly, you’re giving your body time to catch up. Your brain needs about 20 minutes to register that you’re full, but most people’s meals don’t even last that long. Eat too fast, and you’ll miss the signals, which means you could end up eating more than you need—and that’s how you land in the uncomfortably stuffed zone. Nobody enjoys that feeling.
And let’s not forget—eating slowly boosts your satisfaction with food. Taking the time to chew, notice textures, and actually taste what’s in your mouth makes a huge difference. Even if all you’re having is a plain sandwich, savoring every bite can leave you feeling good.
How Eating Slowly Helps Digestion
Think of digestion as a chain reaction:
- Step 1: You think about food.
- Step 2: You start salivating, releasing enzymes in your saliva to prep for chewing.
- Step 3: Your stomach gets ready to produce acid.
- Step 4 and beyond: Your small intestine and the rest of your GI system gear up to do their job.
But here’s the kicker—if you rush through your meal, you’re skipping steps. Big, barely chewed bites hit your stomach like bricks, and your digestive system has to scramble to break it all down. And trust me, surprises suck for your gut. Food that isn’t broken down properly can cause indigestion and other annoying GI issues.
One study from the University of Rhode Island found that fast eaters chew less and take larger bites, meaning their food lands in the stomach as giant lumps, not the well-chewed stuff your gut prefers. Want to avoid that? Slow down, chew more, and give your body a fighting chance.
Eating Slowly Means You Eat Less (Without Trying)
If weight loss or maintenance is your goal, slow eating is one of the easiest ways to stay on track. That same University of Rhode Island study served a big plate of pasta to participants on two occasions. One time, they were told to eat as fast as possible. The second time, they were told to slow down and put their forks down between bites.
Here’s what happened:
- Quick meal: 646 calories in 9 minutes.
- Slow meal: 579 calories in 29 minutes.
That’s 67 fewer calories consumed—just by slowing down. Over the course of three meals a day, those small differences add up. The study also found that the fast eaters felt hungrier just an hour later, while the slow eaters felt satisfied longer.
Slow Eating Can Help Prevent Overeating and Bingeing
Ever felt out of control with food? You’re not alone. One hallmark of binge eating is eating really fast. When you’re deep in a binge, it feels like the food has to go in NOW—there’s no time to think.
But here’s a trick: Just slow down. Even if you’re mid-binge, pausing to chew and slow your pace can snap you out of that cycle. It’s like someone calling your name when you’re lost in a daydream—suddenly, you’re aware of what’s happening. You might not stop eating right away, and that’s okay. But slowing down gives you back a little control, and that’s a huge win.
Better Hydration Comes with Slower Eating
Eating slowly doesn’t just help with food—it increases water intake, too. The same study from earlier found that when participants ate slowly, they drank 14 ounces of water compared to just 9.7 ounces when they ate quickly. More water means better hydration, which supports your muscles, skin, kidneys, and digestion.
What’s the Takeaway?
Here it is: Eat slowly, drink water, and feel satisfied. It’s simple, but it works. Eating too quickly leads to overeating, weight gain, and crappy digestion. Eating slowly gives you control, helps you eat less without feeling deprived, and makes meals more enjoyable.
Tips to Eat More Slowly
- Sit down to eat in a calm environment. No distractions. That means no TV, no texting, and definitely no scrolling through Instagram.
- Put down your utensils between bites. Take a breath. Have a conversation.
- Chew more. Try aiming for a specific number of chews per bite—yes, it will feel weird at first.
- Use smaller plates or chopsticks. It slows you down without you even noticing.
- Pace yourself with a slow eater. Got a chatty friend or a kid who eats at a snail’s pace? Perfect. Match their rhythm.
- Set aside time for your meals. Plan for at least 20-30 minutes per meal. Dinner with family or friends? Make it longer.
- Be kind to yourself if you rush. If you catch yourself eating too fast, pause, refocus, and slow down. It’s all part of building a habit.
Wrap It Up
We live fast-paced lives, so it’s no surprise that meals often become something we rush through. But eating quickly doesn’t do you any favors. It messes with digestion, leads to overeating, and leaves you unsatisfied. On the other hand, eating slowly gives you control, better health, and a more enjoyable relationship with food.
So next time you sit down to eat, take your time. You—and your body—deserve it.
Body Science
Practice Self-Compassion to protect against Self-Sabotage
In our pursuit of health and well-being, it is common to set ambitious goals and strive for perfection. However, we often overlook the importance of self-compassion in this journey. Kristen Neff, a renowned psychologist, has extensively researched the concept of self-compassion and its profound impact on our overall well-being. This section explores the science of self-compassion, highlighting how the lack of self-compassion can lead to self-sabotage in achieving our health goals. Furthermore, it provides step-by-step instructions on how to cultivate self-compassion to foster personal growth and resilience.
Self-compassion is the act of treating oneself with kindness, understanding, and acceptance, particularly during times of suffering, failure, or personal inadequacies. Kristen Neff has identified three core components of self-compassion: self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness. Self-kindness involves responding to oneself with warmth and care, just as we would to a close friend or loved one. Common humanity recognizes that struggles and imperfections are part of the shared human experience, offering comfort in the knowledge that no one is perfect. Mindfulness involves being aware of our thoughts and emotions without judgment, allowing us to cultivate self-awareness and compassionately address our needs.
When we lack self-compassion, we become vulnerable to self-sabotage in our health goals. Instead of responding to setbacks or failures with understanding and support, we often resort to self-criticism, shame, and harsh judgments. This negative self-talk diminishes motivation, erodes self-esteem, and increases stress levels, thereby hindering our progress toward healthier habits. Without self-compassion, we may experience cycles of guilt, shame, and self-doubt, leading to a sense of hopelessness and a higher likelihood of giving up altogether.
Practicing Self Compassion
Developing self-compassion is a transformative journey that requires practice, patience, and a commitment to self-care. The following step-by-step instructions can guide individuals in cultivating self-compassion:
- Practice mindfulness: Cultivate self-awareness by paying attention to your thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judgment. Allow yourself to experience and acknowledge difficult feelings without getting caught up in negative thought patterns. Emotions are neither good nor bad. They just are.
- Recognize self-criticism and negative self-talk: Begin by becoming aware of the ways in which you tend to criticize yourself or engage in negative self-talk. Notice the impact it has on your emotional well-being and your ability to achieve health goals.
- Embrace common humanity: Acknowledge that making mistakes, facing obstacles, and experiencing setbacks are universal aspects of the human experience. Recognize that you are not alone in your struggles, and extend compassion to yourself as you would to others facing similar challenges.
- Cultivate self-kindness: Treat yourself with the same warmth, understanding, and care that you would offer to a close friend. When faced with challenges or setbacks, remind yourself that it is natural to experience difficulties and that you deserve compassion.
- Reframe failures as learning opportunities: Instead of viewing failures as reflections of personal inadequacies, reframe them as opportunities for growth and learning. Embrace a growth mindset that encourages resilience and the belief in your ability to improve over time. You have that ability!
- Engage in self-care: Prioritize self-care activities that nourish your mind, body, and soul. This may include regular exercise, adequate sleep, healthy eating, relaxation techniques, pursuing hobbies, or seeking support from loved ones or professionals when needed.
In our pursuit of health goals, practicing self-compassion is crucial for overcoming self-sabotage and fostering personal growth. Kristen Neff’s work provides valuable insights into the science of self-compassion, emphasizing the importance of treating ourselves with kindness, recognizing our shared human struggles, and cultivating mindfulness. By following the step-by-step instructions for practicing self-compassion, individuals can break free from self-sabotaging patterns, enhance their well-being, and approach their health goals with resilience, self-acceptance, and a greater likelihood of success.
Body Science
Nourish Your Muscles, Lose The Fat
Losing weight is great but if you want to do so in the healthiest way possible, body fat is where it’s at.
When you embark on a weight loss journey, it’s almost guaranteed that you will be saying “Bon Voyage!” to some muscle mass and for women over fifty, that’s a recipe for disaster. You can counteract this phenomenon by losing weight slowly, eating an adequate number of calories, while pumping up your protein intake, and working out. The goal with any weight loss plan is to lose fat and maintain as much lean mass, or muscle, as possible.
Body Science
Stealth Veggies: Your Secret Weapon To Weight Loss
We all know that eating more plants is rule number one for “eating better.” But what if you are a veggie-phobe? Eating more than four servings of vegetables a day can be crazy challenging if you’re a grab-and-go eater, a poor planner, or deathly afraid of all things green.
Even when you know you need to incorporate more vegetables into your diet, it’s easy to look at the clock at dinner time and realize not one bite of nature’s bounty has passed your lips all day.
So how do you get more vegetables into your daily intake?
Read more “Stealth Veggies: Your Secret Weapon To Weight Loss”
Body Science
From Junk Food to Whole Food: Make Changes That…
There’s a little old diet book called Change One. Now I don’t want you to run out and buy. Instead, I’ll summarize here what’s go great about it. I’ll fill you in on why this book is impressive and what we can take from it.
Simple Changes
As you may have guessed, the premise of the book is that in order to create and sustain long-term weight loss, you must ease yourself into it. Start by changing one or two small things that feel manageable: if you overhaul your lifestyle in a week, you will become exhausted and frustrated and the changes won’t stick. Anyone whose ever worked with me knows that this is how I roll. Read more “From Junk Food to Whole Food: Make Changes That Will Stick”
Body Science
Stop Blaming Your Muffin Top On A Slow Metabolism
I don’t want to get all scientific and put everyone to sleep here, so I’ll make this straightforward and basic: your metabolism is the number of calories your body burns doing nothing in a single day.
We all inherit our baseline metabolism; it’s genetic. It also relates to our gender and our age, and as you know and as much as we may wish otherwise, we can’t change our age.
Read more “Stop Blaming Your Muffin Top On A Slow Metabolism”
Body Science
Sleep Better AND Lose Weight!
I am forever talking to people about the importance of sleep when it comes to their overall health and fitness. I believe that the very foundation of our overall health and wellness is dependent equally on three things:
- Our movement
- Our nutrient intake
- Our rest and recovery
Sleep is the epitome of rest and recovery.
I’ve talked before about some of the things we can do to get a better night’s sleep, and I’ve talked about how restricting sleep has been shown to cause weight gain. I recently came across yet another study that shows sleep-deprived people tend to eat upwards of 500+ extra calories over well-rested people every day!
You need to burn a deficit of 3500 calories to lose 1 pound of fat. The math in that suggests that in order to lose 1 pound of fat, all you need to do is sleep well for 7 days!
Now we know that the math doesn’t always match the actual results. We know that there is a lot more involved in weight gain and loss than just sleeping better. But we also know that every little thing we do helps us move closer towards our goals. Every effort, no matter how big or small gets us there quicker. Imagine if you slept better every night! Among having countless other health benefits, this is actually a weight-loss tool that costs you nothing. You can do it for yourself. It is available to just about every single one of us. Why don’t we take advantage of it?
Today, however, I don’t really want to talk about that. What I want to do is share one more tip I’ve learned and have been implementing in my own life. Many of you know I was a medicated insomniac for years so sleep hygiene is something I am very passionate about, and am forever working on improving.
Here’s the tip
To get a better night’s sleep, in addition to reducing light in the evening as so many of us already know we should do, you need high doses of bright light (both blue and yellow – sunlight is ideal) early in the morning, around sunrise if your intent is to wake up at about that time. Our circadian rhythms depend on it. If you live in a place that offers bight daylight, get outside and bathe in that light for at least 5 or 10 minutes each morning. Make it a morning ritual. You can light-bathe through a window if you want, but since windows filter some properties of light it will take much, much longer and you’ll have to sit there for an extended period of time. Go outside if you can.
If you, like me, get up before sunrise and intend to keep it that way, sit under bright, bright lights. I drink my morning coffee and do my reading under a full spectrum happy lamp for this purpose but you don’t need anything special. Florescent lights or ring lights will work too. Just get yourself under bright lights early in the day. And as the day progresses and turns to the evening, expose yourself to less and less light. We all should know by now the importance of reducing screen time at least a few hours before bed. If you’re not yet doing this, it’s a practice worth implementing too.
If you’re interested in the science behind this; if you want to understand how light affects our hormones which affect our sleep-wake cycles I highly recommend you listen to this podcast by Andrew Huberman. This is my newest favourite podcast, by the way.
Sleep well, my friends!
I help busy professional women who struggle with nutrition and fitness silence their inner daemons and get healthy, so they can love the way they feel in their own skin and gain the confidence they need to conquer the rest of their lives.
If you think you might be a candidate for coaching, take the quiz here.
Body Science
ENS & IBS: The Brain & Gut Loop
The enteric nervous system of the gut is intimately connected to and shares a unique bi-directional relationship with the central nervous system. Like a loop, bottom-up messages are sent from the gut to the brain, while top-down messages are sent from the brain to the gut. In addition to being responsible for our ‘gut instincts,’ bottom-up messages influence how we feel physically, emotionally and psychologically, affecting both our cognition and our decision-making abilities. Top-down messaging influences the way our gut functions and its internal environment. When our brain senses danger, for example, if a person were being chased by a bear or were risking humiliation before giving a public speech, the brain sends messages to the gut to evacuate the bowels, before slowing both motility and digestion so that energy stores might be better spent fighting or fleeing whatever is causing the danger. The brain does not always distinguish between real danger and the perceived danger found in many of our daily activities, nor does it perceive the difference between physical or psychological stressors.
In plain English, what this means is that emotional/psychological stress has an affect on the way your gastrointestinal (GI) tract functions and perhaps equally as important, the quality of the environment in which your good gut bacteria thrives or strives. Inversely, the way your GI functions and the quality of your gut bacterial health affects the way you think and feel. Read more “ENS & IBS: The Brain & Gut Loop”
Body Science
All About Ketosis
Our bodies adapt. For a healthy person who consumes a conventional diet where approximately 25% – 30% comes from fat, 40% – 50% from carbohydrates, and the remaining from protein, the body’s preferred source of energy is glucose. If glucose (the building block of most carbohydrates) is available, the body will convert it into energy first. When a healthy person ascribes to a Ketogenic diet where carbohydrates are extremely low, dietary fats are high and protein is moderate, the available glucose is reduced and glycogen stores are depleted. The body learns to pull energy from fat. It then becomes more efficient at creating energy from fat the longer a person is on a Ketogenic diet. A fat-adapted person is someone whose body has learned to seek out fat first for energy production instead of glucose. Read more “All About Ketosis”