HOW TO LOSE WEIGHT AND KEEP IT OFF? Part 3
HOW TO TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO EAT LESS BY DEVELOPING MINDFUL EATING HABITS
Mounting clinical and scientific evidence clearly show that willpower enforced dieting, counting calories, banning your favorite foods, starving yourself to lose weight don’t work. It is time to let go all these old ideas of weight loss.
Luckily there is an alternative, short of bariatric gastric-bypass surgery to lose weight and to keep it off. It is called “train your brain to develop mindful eating habits.”
Before we go into it, let’s first refresh our knowledge of physiology of eating to better understand mindful eating.
Eating is necessity for life. For this, our brain and gastrointestinal (GI) tract are very closely connected. Both these very important organs originate from the same cells in the embryo. They remain connected after birth, with massive network of nerves and special cells called “neuro endocrine cells”, for two way “neuro- chemical” communications. So much so that in some circles the CNS (central nervous system) is called “the first brain,” and ENS (enteric nervous system) is called “the second brain”, where our “gut feeling decisions” originate.
So, our first brain and our second brain together play the most important role in our food selection and consumption. Therefore, we must work on our brain first to make drastic changes in our eating and dietary habits.
Variety of gastrointestinal hormones and signal molecules that originate in the Gi tract, initiate and regulate our hunger and satiety feelings. We receive many kinds of information about the food we eat. Just thinking about food could trigger the secretion of multiple GI hormones and digestive enzymes. We receive many more information with our senses about the food, before we start eating, we see its color, its texture, its freshness, its presentation, its amount, and we smell its odor. And, when we start eating, special cells in our mouth (taste buds) make us taste our food. All these information help us to enjoy our food more and helps us to digest and absorb our food by stimulating the output of more digestive hormones, enzymes and juices.
Some GI peptides also control the blood sugar level by properly regulating insulin output. And some GI hormones, called “satiety hormones” regulate satiety feeling, thereby restricting the size of ingested meal. Scientific studies have shown that satiety feeling returns within 25- 30 minutes after eating starts.
“Mindful eating” starts only, after we have to talk to our thinking and willful brain that we want to slow down eating speed, and to pay full attention to all the aspects of the information phases that obtained during eating and the digestive processes.
If you have noticed, fat people eat very fast, hardly chewing or tasting their food. By doing so, they can consume huge amount of food within 30 minutes of time period, before satiety feeling returns and restrict their food intake.
So, the first rule of mindful eating should be to slow down our eating speed. This serves two main purposes:
1 -The pleasure of eating comes from the smelling and tasting our food. Taste buds are in our mouth and on our tongue. Once we swallow our food, we can no longer taste it. Therefore, to increase contact time with the taste buds, the food has to stay in our mouth for longer period of time, by chewing it slowly and multiple times (30 times or more), while noticing its flavor and its mixing with our saliva and becoming liquid in consistency in our mouth before we swallow it down.
2 -By doing so we enjoy our food for a longer period of time and, we allow time for satiety feeling to come back and prevent us from eating more.
There should be no multitasking, like watching TV or reading while we are eating. Because we are trying to be mindful and to pay our full attention to the food we are eating, and also all the phases of ingestion. Otherwise, we wouldn’t know how much food we consumed, if full attention is not paid.
We should use a small plate with small amount of food. Big plates dictate to put more food in them.
We should never place the dinner pot on the dinner table for easy access.
It takes time to develop mindful eating habits. We must be patient. In one study, it took around 30-to-40 tries to develop mindful eating habits. But rewards are tremendous. We do not ban any of our favorite foods, we just eat slow and small amount of it. We may not lose a lot of weight, but we feel mentally and physically very healthy. We enjoy our food better and never gain back the weight we lost.
