Eat to maintain proper digestive function.

Eat to maintain proper blood sugar regulation.

Follow a plan that will help you reach your own personal health goals.

In this chapter, you will learn about these various body parts, the process of assimilating/integrating food matter, and, yes, your poop.

Think of digestion as a North-to-South process. You may think it starts in your mouth and ends you know where, but digestion actually begins before the food enters your mouth. In fact, it begins in your brain.

the part: your brain

Remember when you were a kid, and your mother made you wait thirty minutes after lunch before swimming or running around to play?

There’s a good reason to leave a window between eating and heightened activity: Your body can’t focus on digesting food when you ask it to perform other actions like active play or exercise. Physical activity—or any activity that’s stressful, including a dreaded work meeting or life event—occurs in a different physical and mental state than what you need for digestion. This stressful state is called the “sympathetic dominant” state or “fight or flight mode.” In fact, your thoughts can impair or improve salivary response, stomach acid production, enzyme secretion, and the release of gastrointestinal (digestive) hormones.

It’s your brain’s job to decide for your body whether to divert attention to stress responses, such as when you exercise, or to nourishing functions like resting and digesting. If you’re in fight or flight mode because of a mental or physical stressor, your body will divert energy and blood flow away from the digestive process and toward other priorities like managing and responding to the stressful stimuli.

If your body senses that it needs to be on alert or handling stressors, the natural cycle of “rest and digest” is switched off, which means that autonomic (automatic or subconscious) body functions are down-regulated. Therefore, if you want to digest your food optimally, allow a mental break or “chill-out” period when switching from a stressed (fight or flight) state into a state where you are ready to rest and digest food (known as the “parasympathetic” state).

This goes against most things you’ve been told about post-workout nutrition, doesn’t it? You have likely been told to make sure you eat withinthirty minutes of working out when you actually should wait until thirty minutes after your workout. What you’ve been taught is ideal for professional athletes and bodybuilders, but not for the average person.Unless you’re extremely active and need extra calories as a result, such as in the case of a coach who trains people all day or someone with a very active day job, the directive to eat within thirty minutes of a workout doesn’t apply to you.

If your activity level is high, and you want to eat immediately after a workout, liquid forms are easier to digest, as they don’t require the same digestive function.

The reason we have been told to eat within thirty minutes of working out is that we may gain a metabolic advantage from calories taken in during this window of time. The problem is that it’s nearly impossible to gain this advantage from whole foods when your digestive system is still in fight or flight mode.

The average person who simply exercises regularly and does not perform any hard training as a competitive athlete takes in sufficient food each day to replace the nutrients depleted by exercise. In fact, many of my clients have found that dropping their post-workout shake allows them to finally lose the fat they’ve been battling for months. Instead, they wait at least thirty minutes and continue with solid whole foods at mealtime.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14