Category: Nutrition

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The importance of chewing

I am a fast eater. Always have been, at least since my college days, perhaps prior to that as well. Not sure why I am that way, but I do know that when dining with friends, I am among the first to finish a meal.

I am attempting to put an end to that.

A friend of mine some time ago — so long ago I can’t remember his name (oh, wait, I think it was Wallace Berry) — used to make a big deal about chewing. He insisted that each bite should be chewed thoroughly. He had a precise number of times, I forget the number (seems like it was in the 20s), that he chewed each bite of food to ensure its proper mastication and digestion.

Okay, maybe that guy was a little OCD, but he had a point, and I’ve always remembered it.

Why chew? Here’s what I’ve found from reading and experimenting.

“Chewing gears up the rest of the digestive system, gets it ready to process incoming nutrition.” This sounds tenuous to me, but maybe. Maybe that’s why chewing gum gives you gas (supposedly — I’ve read about this phenomenon, but I don’t chew gum, so I don’t know if it’s true for me or not).

“Chewing gives your system more time to process the food, to understand how much food you’ve consumed, and to more readily let you know when you are full.” Again, this sounds a bit nonsensical to me. How much time does my stomach really need to let my brain know it’s full? It’s not like I swallow a whole stomachful of food at once.

“Chewing adds saliva to the food, which helps break it down.” Digestion is a mechanical AND chemical process, so this makes sense, exposing more of the food’s surface area to the chemicals in saliva would be beneficial.

“Having been chewed helps when the food hits the gastric juices in the stomach.” This is to me the most obvious benefit of chewing. I mean, if you were to drop an intact hunk of steak into a jar of acid, and a chewed up hunk into a different jar of acid, it’s easy to imagine which would dissolve first. (For those of you who have problems with imagination, the chewed up hunk will.)

But why did I call that “the most obvious benefit of chewing”? I have a very practical reason: The longer your food takes to digest, the more gas you produce, and we all know how uncomfortable that can be.

I’ve experimented with chewing more over the past couple of weeks, and I have definitely noticed some improvement in my gastric comfort. I’ll continue to work on my chewing — after all, a lifetime of bad chewing is not going to fix itself that easily — and see what happens.

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Is breakfast really that important?

I ate breakfast this morning. I did it because I was hungry, and when I’m hungry, I eat.

Conversely, when I’m not hungry, I do not eat. And, generally, I am not hungry around breakfast time.

But, but … isn’t breakfast the most important meal of the day?

Well, we’ve already discussed which meal is most important, but, suffice to say, I don’t think it’s breakfast.

But, but … doesn’t your body need to replenish itself from not having eaten for so long?

I’m guessing “no”, because if my body needed to replenish itself, wouldn’t it create a hunger sensation? I don’t usually feel hungry in the morning, so ….

BreakfastLook, all I’m asking is this: If I’m not hungry, why should I force myself to eat?

Sure, I’ve read a books about nutrient timing, have seen folks I respect advocating lots of small meals throughout the day, others telling me I should never skip breakfast. I get it, and, quite honestly, I think much of it makes sense.

But the gains to be had by adhering to such rigid restrictions are small. Much — if not all — of the research on nutrient timing is conducted on athletes, bodybuilders, powerlifters. I’m just a regular guy.

There has been a lot of research into the hazards of skipping breakfast, and there are all kinds of hypotheses out there. My favorite is that my body goes into starvation mode until I eat breakfast. Wow, my body is putting itself on deathwatch after not having eaten in 12 hours? Really? And here I am not even feeling hungry.

Other breakfast advocates claim that if I don’t eat breakfast, I’ll be more inclined to grab a snack at 10am. What’s wrong with that? Or maybe skipping breakfast will cause me to eat more at lunch. Well, I did skip breakfast, so if I grab a few extra calories at lunch….

Then there are the ideas that breakfast jumpstarts your metabolism, helps you think better, gives you energy. All those may be true, but only marginally.

It’s like when Cheerios claimed that it could “lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks.” First of all: Sure it can, if it helps you lose weight by reducing your caloric intake. So can any food, properly consumed. But, more importantly: So what? 4%? Really? So that will take your high cholesterol from 350 to 336. Marginal improvement at best. If you were to do a round of Insanity or the first 6 weeks of P90X while switching to a high protein diet, you’d do much better than that after 6 weeks, I will guarantee you that.

So, here’s the deal, why breakfast usually doesn’t work for me:

1) I’m just not hungry in the morning
2) I usually work out in the morning, and I don’t like to have to wait for my food to settle
3) I have other things to do in the morning besides eat breakfast
4) I have a rule of thumb for life: If everyone believes that something debatable is true, then it’s probably not true, or, at the very least, it deserves a high amount of scrutiny.

Bottom line is that I’m not going to force myself to eat breakfast if I’m not hungry at breakfast time and it doesn’t fit into my schedule. Anyway, I wonder how many of those breakfast studies are funded by Quaker, Kellogg, and General Mills?

I’m not saying you shouldn’t eat breakfast. If you’re hungry, eat away! Just don’t try to force that food down my throat.

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Fear of falling back into old habits

I wouldn’t call it exactly a “fear”, but, wow, I am really not interested in falling back into my old habits, which include:

  • overeating
  • overdrinking
  • oversittingonmyass

all of which lead, of course, to being

  • overweight

I may tend to obsess about this. I measure my waist at least once daily. If I go more than a day without working out, I get nervous that I may enjoy sitting around too much. When I indulge myself by occasionally feasting on crap food I used to eat all the time, I become concerned that this indulgence will become the norm.

And I think those “fears” are the key to keeping the old habits at bay.

As soon as I don’t care any more, the moment I no longer feel at least a twinge of guilt for engaging in relatively unhealthy behaviors, that is when I will have a problem.

But as of right now, it’s all good.

I can have that night where I eat every carb in the house, knowing that the next day I will scale back to meat and veggies only.

I can go to the occasional party and drink too much of my homemade limoncello, knowing that I will not drink again for a week after that. (Well, unless it’s a multi-day party, in which case, all bets are off ;=)

I can skip a couple workouts in a row, knowing that I’ll be at it hard the day I come back, probably with an extra few minutes for good measure.

And all this is based on a fear of falling back, a fear of being fat again, of being out of shape again. Yes, it is, I think, after all, a “fear”.

But it’s a healthy one that I think I’ll keep at the front of my mind.

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How about eating right half the time? Will that work for you?

Look at yourself. Take a good, hard look. Do you like what you see?

Maybe you do. Congratulations!

pizzaBut maybe you’re disappointed you’re not in better shape. Maybe you’ve been trying to break the fast-food habit, but aren’t sure how to start. If so, this post is for you!

Our body composition is primarily — 80% — determined by what we eat. Sure, we need to exercise to build muscle and get fully fit, but we can’t get away from the fact that we can do the most good for our bodies by eating properly.

Now, I know, we’ve all been on diets that failed. We just can’t seem to stick with them. Even if the results are good, our lives make dieting challenging, especially if those diets are particular restrictive, like the ones that allow only 1000 calories a day or that totally disallow anything with sugar in it.

Because of those kinds of eating plans, people often get wrapped around the diet axle. It’s too much of a commitment. It’s too hard to avoid all those “bad” foods.

Think of all the workplace dietary health hazards, like birthday cakes, donuts and breakfast tacos someone brings in, cookies someone baked. Heck, it’s downright impolite to refuse to eat those things!

Yeah, it’s tough to stay on a healthy eating plan.

But if you really are disappointed with your choices, it’s time to make better ones.

So here’s an idea. Instead of stopping all your current dining habits completely, and jumping into some diet that you know you’ll never stay on, how about you eat healthy, say, 50% of the time.

Half the time. Half your meals — healthy. Just half.

So, then, 4 days a week — healthy eating. The other 3 days, you eat whatever you like.

(Yeah, I already moved your half up to 57% with the 4 out of 7 days thing, but you can live with that, right? It’s just so much cleaner and easier to keep track of that way, instead of having to factor in a half-day there somewhere….)

Your first inclination might be to make your days Friday, Saturday, and Sunday — the weekend — but you may want to rethink that. Do you really need to let go on Sunday? Heck, that’s the start of a new week and a good day to get back into the swing of things.

Thursday through Saturday? That might work for you. Or Monday and Thursday and Saturday. Or change them up every week depending on what’s going on. Up to you.

The whole point of this post is to remind you that you don’t have to be 100% health-conscious 100% of the time. I threw 50% out there, but, seriously, any number you can use to help yourself get more fit — 10%, 25%, 50% — that’s all good. Anything’s better than 0%, right?

Hopefully, once you get into it and start seeing positive results, start looking and feeling better, you’ll decide to add another day of healthy eating, and another day. Six out of seven days of healthy eating would be 86%. That’s pretty good.

But, um, I wouldn’t go beyond that — you have to leave room for the occasional pizza binge, ya know?

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P90X: A Lifetime Commitment?

A friend of mine told me the other day that she was interested in Tony Horton’s P90X, but didn’t want to be stuck doing it for the rest of her life.

I laughed, because those are almost the exact words I said to my brother when he was trying to get me into P90X. I wanted to be in better shape, but I didn’t want to commit my life to it, ya know? I have other things to do besides spending all my time working out.

Having been through the program a couple times, and now nearing the end of Insanity, I was able to tell my friend in all sincerity, “You won’t be stuck doing it for the rest of your life. But you will be so impressed with the results, you will want to do it for the rest of your life.”

And that is a fact, or, at least, that’s how it worked for me.

P90X is a very well thought-out program. As I was going through it the first time, I noted that the exercises flowed well together, the routines were well-placed, the recovery days came at just the right time.

In addition to the exercises, though, along with P90X you get:

1. A Nutrition Guide. This is very important, because you truly are what you eat. Exercise is great for toning and building muscle and other parts of your body, like your brain and skeleton, but when it comes to losing fat, you will have a hard time doing that without watching what you eat.

This is not as restrictive as it seems. I went on a 50% protein, 30% carb, 20% fat diet the day I started P90X, and in order to consume all the calories I needed, I had to add protein shakes!

Here is a calorie calculator that is pretty cool, if you want to see how many calories you’ll need to consume: http://bit.ly/l41F21. Select “5 times/week (intense)” for exercise your level.

You’ll see this is no 1200-calorie/day diet. You need the extra calories to allow you to “bring it” during the workouts.

2. A life-after-P90X plan. This the part that really impressed me as I read it before I started the program. I knew I didn’t want to be Mr. Gym Rat. I wanted to get fit, then maintain what I had, not necessarily keep growing muscle and getting fitter.

The Life-After-P90X plan includes a workout schedule that is very much toned down, but still allows you to keep 80% of what you’ve gained from P90X. Should you do another iteration of the full program from time to time? Sure.

But here’s the key: You will want to.

My body was in so much better shape after just 4 weeks of P90X, I had no doubt that I would keep doing this, or something like this, for the rest of my life.

So, is P90X a lifetime commitment? It doesn’t have to be … but, if your experience is the same as mine, you’ll want it to be.