What if HOW you eat made as much difference as WHAT you eat to your IBS symptoms?

In this episode I'll cover some non-food tips for better digestion.

• The effect of stress on your digestive system
• How many times should you chew your food?
• Why sitting at a table for meals can help IBS
• Can you be TOO mindful?

Find more information on IBS and digestive health on my website www.goodnessme-nutrition.com or watch more videos on Instagram @goodnessme_nutrition.

Useful blogs posts from my website

• How many times should I chew my food? https://www.goodnessme-nutrition.com/ibs/how-many-times-should-i-chew-my-food/
• Could meditation help your gut health? https://www.goodnessme-nutrition.com/gut-health/could-meditation-help-your-gut-health/

Welcome to the Inside Knowledge for people with IBS, with me, Anna Mapson.

When I started out as a nutritional therapist, I often spent time

thinking about complex nutrition interventions, like studying textbooks,

and really enjoyed learning and applying this nutrition science.

Now, over six years later, I can see some of the most simple changes are

sometimes the most effective when it comes to dealing with my client's IBS.

What if how you eat has got as much impact on your symptoms as what you eat?

In this episode of The Inside Knowledge, I'll be explaining why

changing how you're eating can improve your digestive symptoms, sometimes

even without changing your diet.

Today's episode is all about mindful eating.

And it doesn't matter if you haven't heard that term before, I'm going to

explain to you a little bit about what I actually mean, and there's going to

be some practical things in here which you can start implementing from today

to really help you understand a bit more about how you eat, how it affects

your digestion, and why this is a really important topic if you've got IBS.

I'm sure you've all heard of the fight or flight response.

That's when we're in a state of stress and high anxiety and it's our body's natural

response to threat, to perceived threat.

Now obviously in today's world we don't often face mortal danger,

mortal peril, but what we do have is a lot of chronic stress.

We have things coming at us all the time.

Raising our blood pressure, raising our defences, and this is basically like

natural response to, like I said, to danger, but the way your body deals with

it is to get your body ready for fighting or for running away, which means that

your skeletal muscles like your legs and your arms get a good flow of blood,

your digestion doesn't, and I'm going to come on to that in a sec, but basically

your Body is trying to get you ready for tackling the danger that could mean

expanding your pupils so that you can see clearly, raising your heart rate a

little bit, but what it's not going to do is prioritise digestion, prioritise

breaking down your proteins effectively so you can properly absorb amino acids.

So, We need to get into an eating state of mind.

We need to make sure that our blood flow is going to the digestive system and that

also we can help produce our stomach acid.

So if you think about when you're in that fight or flight response mode,

Your body will not be prioritizing the digestion, which means it's sending less

blood flow to your gut, so there's not as much energy, basically, just being

sent towards the digestive system, and that can slow down motility, and

it can also affect the production of stomach acid and digestive enzymes.

It can actually, as well, speed up digestion, so if you're someone who

experiences, high diarrhea, Predominance rather than constipation actually what

happens is your body's trying to evacuate quickly in order to run So it's kind

of like let's get rid of this stuff.

We need to then be ready to run away some of the simple things that you

can do to start addressing this even if your Experience of stress doesn't

go away is to just help your body to get into a more parasympathetic mode.

That's like the rest and digest, the calm state.

And one of the ways we can influence that is through our breathing.

And the way that that works is that when we're breathing out and slow, long out

breaths, that helps to reassure your body, our bodies that we're in a good space.

We're trying to get our bodies into eating mode here.

This mindful eating is helpful.

And it is helped by slow breathing, so just simple three breaths

before you eat each meal can just help to kind of physically get

you out of that stressed state.

So where you feel like you're holding tension, you're like

maybe holding your breath.

breath a little bit with shallow breaths, just really doing some deep breathing.

And if you feel like this is way too basic, way too simple, and this is

not going to have any effect on your digestion, I just really encourage

you to give it a go for one week.

Just try taking three breaths, sitting at the table and trying to get into

Digestion mode before you eat anything.

Now you might have heard the phrase like, the first bite is with the eye, and that

is all about like presenting your food nicely, making it look nice, rather than

like slopping it out onto the plate.

But actually, the first phase of digestion is Sometimes called the cephalic phase.

It's actually engaging your brain and really getting your senses

involved in the digestive process.

The way this helps is that it's like encouraging our body to

think, Oh yeah, food is coming.

Okay, let's switch into digest mode.

And that helps us to release our stomach acid and to try and get the

motility regulated so that you try and minimize your digestive symptoms.

So all you have to do is try and take three breaths.

That's one of the first things we can do.

Easily do.

It's free, it doesn't take much time.

You can take longer doing like a calming food meditation if you have

the time and the space to do that, but just simply three simple breaths

could be enough to start clicking out of that fight or flight mode.

Something else which also really helps is to avoid distractions.

This means turning off Netflix, stop scrolling your

phone and put away your book.

If you feel really Self conscious eating at a table on your own, then perhaps you

could have a podcast on or a radio program or something that you can just listen to.

But the idea is to really focus on the food rather than

looking at something else.

You've probably been in that sort of situation where you're just working and

you're reaching for the crisps and then you reach again and they're all gone and

you think, Oh, I ate them all and I didn't even notice I was eating them because

they're just kind of mindlessly eating.

Now, that is just eating, like I said, mindlessly rather than mindfully,

so you want to try and avoid that by stopping too many distractions whilst

you are in the middle of a meal.

The next practical tip for you is to try and chew your food really, really well.

This is about giving your body the best chance of breaking it up in a chemical.

digestion way.

So if you think about food coming in through your mouth, we've

got various forms of mechanisms to break the food down.

Firstly, we use our teeth to mash the food up in the mouth.

It also gets mixed with saliva there.

And some of the digestion of carbohydrates actually starts in the mouth, something

called salivary amylase, which is like a digestive enzyme inside your saliva.

So the longer you can chew your food.

Food.

These enzymes actually will start to get to work and break the food down.

If you wanna do a cool little experiment, you can try how long it takes for

bread to taste sweet if you chew it and chew it and try it with some whole

grain bread and some white bread.

And normally the white bread could go to glucose quicker because it's actually

a simple, more simple carbohydrate and it will be broken down quicker.

You can try this with any kind of carbohydrate.

It's like rice as well.

And do a little experiment to see how long it takes your food to start tasting.

Sweet.

And that is the.

The point of chewing your food up really well though, is mostly about

creating a larger surface area in order for the chemical digestion to happen

as effectively as it can inside your stomach and then your small intestines.

If you're swallowing big lumps of food, there's only going to be one

surface area on that large lump.

Whereas if you mash the food up really well, You're creating a larger surface

area where the things like your stomach acid, digestive enzymes can get to

work and start to break that food down in a chemical way to make the

molecules small enough to be properly absorbed in your small intestine.

There was some research thinking that we had to chew up our food about 30

times before we could swallow it.

And actually, this takes a very long time and it feels a lot like overkill.

It's quite laborious.

But it's a good experiment, again, to see how long it takes you to

do this 30 chews and what it feels like to have food that's almost to

a very baby ish food consistency, so very smooth with no big lumps.

That's what you're aiming for.

The other benefits to chewing...

Really well is it just allows you to slow down in your meal times and you normally

are able to better judge whether you've had Enough food if you eat more slowly

whereas sometimes if you eat really fast, you can actually eat more than you need

to because of the way that the chemical digestion, like, processes happen.

So, when you eat things like protein and fats, you get chemical messages

back from your gut to your brain to tell you that you've got these

nutrients in and you, you know, you've had enough, you can stop eating.

Whereas if you've eaten really, really fast, you could have already

eaten more than you need to.

The next little practical tip that I want to touch on is about sitting at the table.

Not everyone does this and I think sitting away from the TV, sitting

with the plate of food on the table and you're on a chair rather than the

food, like, on your lap, it can really help your digestion to work better.

And it can just really help you just sit upright, which

also improves your digestion.

Whilst we're talking about mindfulness, I thought it'd be also worth

running through a little bit of information about getting too mindful.

And I know that sounds a bit odd, but I think there's a real balance

between tuning into our symptoms, tuning into what's going on.

And also they're not ruminating too much on them because we also want to

be able to eat without fear, without the worry that everything you eat is

going to be causing some IBS nightmare.

There's two words for this.

One's interoception.

That's like understanding your various body states and being aware of them.

And also just like being aware of everything in your outside environment.

So it's a balance between being aware of what's happening inside, but also not

becoming obsessed or becoming too hyper focused on your symptoms and forgetting

to bring your senses and your awareness to things that are outside your body.

Which, I find people who have IBS, because it's so all consuming and can be so

painful, so, you know, embarrassing, all of these things, you focus on it so much,

that actually it's important to bring that mindfulness to other parts of your life.

So whilst I'm saying yes, be mindful about eating, I'm also asking you

here to be, I suppose, mindful about other things in your life.

So it could be being mindful when you go for a walk, like you're

walking your kids to school, you're getting a commute to work.

You're just trying to bring a bit of awareness to the sensations of walking,

you know, the feeling the rain on your skin, feeling your feet on the floor,

like, maybe just bringing that mindfulness sensation to everyday things, not just

to your digestion, because , that hyper focus can also start to Really create

little patterns and tracks in your brain that are quite hard to break out of.

And that's part of like feeling better is going to...

Be able to break those thought patterns down so that you can have more normal

thoughts about your digestion So sometimes little things that help with that is like

little gratitude Practices like thinking about things that are good in your life

and even focusing on things that are good in your body Despite having IBS.

So thinking about yes I have got digestive issues and I can still enjoy my life or

I can enjoy My life, and still feel this pain, and I can get on and do things, or

other parts of my body are working really well, like, are my legs operating okay?

I'm grateful for that.

Now I know, it is all consuming, and I'm not saying, it's just as

easy as saying, just forget about it, or just focus on something else.

Because when you're in a lot of pain or you're feeling really uncomfortable,

it's not easy to just switch off.

But there's a part to mindfulness to trying to bring some of that hyperfocus to

other parts of the whole body that we are.

It's not just about your IBS.

Your life is more than your IBS.

So just to sum up this episode, we've talked about mindful eating, how to

slow down, how to try to make time for your meals, and actually to chew your

food really properly, make meals more of an experience where you are engaging

your whole body, not just your mouth.

And also then we talked about mindfulness and how you can Start to try and use

that to focus less on your digestive symptoms and put them in a context of

your entire life and your whole person.

That's it for this episode.