How and why to help your digestion

My latest focus on our healthy journey as a family is digestion. 

Digestion is the first thing that needs to be working right for all the nutrients your consuming to actually be absorbed and used properly. If digestion is off, then it doesn’t do you as much good to be eating all the nutrient dense foods because your body isnt able to use them. 

Some signs of poor digestion can be bloating, bad gas, discomfort, constipation, diarrhea, and heartburn. Especially if it happens soon after eating a meal. 

Now the good news there are some really easy things you can do to help with digestion and things that we have been implementing ourselves as a family. 

Digestion begins in the brain, by taking a moment before eating and helping your body relax into the rest and digest state, you are signaling your gut to start producing stomach acid. I think this is why Jesus modeled praying before meals, not only because giving thanks to God for providing is important, but also to help your body relax so it can properly digest the food. Pretty cool I think! 

You can also stimulate your vagus nerve by either humming, deep breaths, or pressing just behind your ear lobe in that little divot.

Another way to help is to really settle down for your meals, allow time to enjoy your nourishment, a lot of effort goes into creating each healthy meal and I feel like its a bit of a disservice to try and eat it in 5 min. Now, that doesn’t mean every meal needs to take an hour, but if you simply take a few more minutes to enjoy and talk with your loved ones, that can be a huge help! 

My favorite way to enjoy meals is to eat them outside. Cooking outside is even better! Something about the fresh air just invites a more relaxing feel to the meals. 

And my final tip. This one might seem even more elementary but it is actually probably the one Cameron and I need to work on the most. That is chewing your food. This kind of goes back to enjoying your meal. I know both of us are guilty of just trying to get meals over so we can go back to getting things done. Now that I have really consciously started slowing down and chewing my food, I realize how bad I was about swallowing big pieces of food. The issue with that is your stomach will have a harder time breaking that down, and then it gets moved on to the intestines and can ferment and feed bad bacteria. Which causes more gut unbalance and issues. 

The more I study and learn about the human body, the more amazed I am at it. It is so incredibly resilient and puts up with a lot of abuse! I also think its a real shame more of this isn’t taught to use at a young age. I am sharing everything I can with my kids so they will know how to fuel their body’s and thrive!