I think it is safe to say that we all love food. We couldn't last very long without food. Just picture a time when food was scarce and we were hunting and gathering. Once we were able to eat, it probably felt like nothing else mattered. Just super grateful for being able to survive another day because no one knows when the next meal would be. Also I could see that if we had to chase down an animal, gather food for the village, or prepare the crop we were probably not relaxed. It was work that needed blood to be in our muscles to perform the task. We were more in a stressful survival state. When we come to eat, we want to be in a nice, relaxed state to eat. This will allow the blood to be in our internal organs to provide the natural state of digesting. Being grateful for our food can help us get into that relaxed state to get the most out of our meal.
Gratefulness while eating has been researched to provide people in getting the most out of their food. Gratitude puts you in a parasympathetic state which means more of a relaxed, rest, and digest state. The flip side to that is a sympathetic state, which is about fight or flight. We are beautifully designed that we have a system in our body that will allow us to gather up the food with our sympathetic nervous system and a parasympathetic nervous system that gets us rolling on digesting and assimilating that food.
An aspect of gratitude helps us get into a nice relaxed state to absorb more of our food. But I personally believe there is a catch. We can't just say that we are grateful for the food in front of us, we need to embody the sensation of gratitude to get the body on board. That will really get the body in a nice relaxed state. For example, we may have had a time when we received a gift and said thanks. But I bet that there was a time that someone genuinely did something spontaneous for you and you said thank you and felt like a much deeper sense of gratitude. That feeling is what I am talking about. The feeling is what releases hormones, chemicals, enzymes and so on to help with digestion.
My suggestion for you is to do the same thing many of us have been doing forever. Say grace before meals. I don’t mean in a religious standpoint, that's up to you. I mean in a standpoint of embodying the emotion of gratitude. Being thankful for the farmer/butcher, the store, the hands that prepared the food and the food itself. Anything that you wish to give thanks about. This will dramatically change how you digest your food. Before saying grace, give your body time to relax, take some deep breaths to get into a parasympathetic state, and embody the gratefulness. This is a SuperPower that many of those don’t properly do as it relates to digesting your food. Make it a habit and you will not have to keep putting attention on it because it will be second nature. Just like how you know exactly how to write your name down on a piece of paper.
Have a wonderful day,
Eddy
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