Don’t Stress, Digest!
We’ve all heard the expression “you are what you eat”. While that holds validity, as the food you use as fuel for your body gets broken down and becomes a part of your cells, it’s not all true. Many people who eat clean diets and live holistic lifestyles but don’t feel and / or see the results may suffer from issues in absorbing and digesting the nutrients. You may be eating the kale, but it doesn’t do you any good if you're not absorbing its benefits. We are only as healthy as the food we can digest.
Just like everything in health, a person's ability to digest and absorb nutrients from foods depends on many things, but one main way a person’s digestive capabilities are minimal could be because of adrenals and the production of excess cortisol, our main stress hormone. The cortisol produced by your adrenal glands can affect the quality of the gut microbiome, how much it absorbs, and how it moves things through the colon. When my clients are dealing with digestive distress, I always recommend taking a look at the causes of stress in their lives and to see if we can develop habits to help.
It comes as no shock that excess stress does damage to the body, but it’s not always common knowledge that it directly affects the guts' ability to absorb and digest nutrients too. The body cannot stress and digest at the same time, as when the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight) is activated all other non-emergency processes pause, including digestion. There are many stress relieving tools that are beneficial towards helping your food digest, and those are:
Eat uninterrupted and under-stimulated allowing you to eat while in a calm state.
Avoid using technology, working, or anything else while eating so both you and your body can focus on the task at hand; digesting the food it's consuming.
Practice eating slowly to not signal stress and to allow the first process of digestion, saliva, to truly take effect and improve the rest of the digestion process.
Enjoy a quick 10-15 minute walk after meals to help stimulate efficient digestion and to help calm the nervous system with time outside
The digestion system is extremely intricate and contains many moving parts, but all of it doesn’t do much when it’s not digesting properly. In improving the quality of your stress management you can not only experience more moments of bliss, you’ll also experience more moments of effective digestion. Through stress regulation, we really can begin to see the benefits of clean, holistic living.
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