Brian (1s):
Hello, and welcome to the Get Lean and Eat Clean podcast. My name is Brian grn. I'm a certified health coach, trainer and author, and this podcast is for middle-aged men and women looking to optimize their health and get their bodies back to what it once was 10 to 15 years ago. I will give you simple, actionable items to get long-term sustainable results. Thanks for listening and enjoy the show. All right, welcome to the Get Laney Clean podcast. My name is Brian Grin. I hope you had a great weekend. Happy Tuesday if you're listening to us on Tuesday, and hopefully you'll listen to my interview with Dr.
Brian (43s):
Krista Scott Dixon. She was the former director of curriculum at Precision Nutrition, which is one of the largest private nutrition coaching and education platforms in the world. And she's authored several books. And, you know, we touched on all about how her perspective about food has changed her eating routine, the importance of circadian rhythm when it comes to eating, and much, much more. So if you haven't already, definitely listened to episode 2 54 with Dr. Krista Scott Dixon. Now on today's micro podcast, I want to piggyback off something we actually discussed during my last interview with Dr.
Brian (1m 26s):
Krista Scott was slow eating. And this is something that's come up quite a bit on the podcast and I feel like we just like gloss over it. You know, people are like, oh yeah, I'm gonna eat slow and eat mindfully and blah, blah, blah, and, and they, and they, you know, nothing really comes of it. And I, I would agree, I'm, I'm sort of, I've become sort of the same way. I mean, I don't feel like I'm the fastest eater, but I'm definitely, I do try to sit down for every meal and I'm not trying to rush. I think that's a tip in itself is, you know, if you could have all your meals sitting down at a table, great place to start.
Brian (2m 6s):
And then from there, instead of eating 'em and, and you know, in a ball, you know, in a movie theater or not that you're gonna have dinner in a movie theater, but in your car or on the run or just grabbing stuff and going, my wife tends to do this. I tell her, just sit down and have a meal and, and just sort of be present with it. And people are probably like, oh, that's like woo-hoo and whatever. But I really don't think it is. I think it's something that as, as I'm gonna go into it today, I'm gonna bring up some, some observational studies regarding eating slowly. But for one thing, you digest better, no doubt about it. Simply put, it can help you, I believe. And through these observational studies, it can help you lose or may maybe even maintain your weight more easily.
Brian (2m 52s):
You'll feel more satisfied with each meal. And if you're rushing your meals, your digestion suffers. Meals become almost like stressful. And we all know we want, we want to try to avoid stress as much as possible. Granted, some stress is good, but eating fast and making it a stressful event is not gonna do anyone, any, any positive, any positive benefits from that. So I wanted to touch on a little bit more on this because I try, and hopefully you guys can see this, is I try to find little things that are simple, doable, and make the biggest impact. And I think this is one of them. You know, I always talk about going for walks, eating slowly, something everyone can do.
Brian (3m 34s):
There's no special skill to it, it's just about being mindful more and understanding that, you know, we're, we're in a rushed, distracted world already, and why should we have our meals be the same way? You know, we're rushing the work or taking the kids to school or whatever. This should be a time where we sort of enjoy the fact that we're allowed to have a meal, right? There's people who don't know where their next meal is coming from. So eating slowly is something that I think everyone can benefit from and implement into their lives tomorrow, okay? They don't need some big elaborate plan or a, or a coach per se to help them with that.
Brian (4m 17s):
And so, I'm gonna talk about some of the reasons why I think you should eat slowly, and then I'll, I'll go into a couple of studies as well. One of 'em is the sensing, the satisfaction, and giving your body time to recognize it's full. It takes about 20 minutes from the start of a meal for the brain to send out signals of satiety. Most people's meals don't even last that long, and sometimes that happens with myself. So if your meals are, if you're eating meals that are 20 minutes or less, sometimes your body doesn't even recognize it's full till after the fact. So it usually takes 20 minutes to send up that signal of satiety. And at that point, you know, imagine the extra calories, extra calories you could ingest simply because you didn't allow your body to register that it no longer required food, right?
Brian (5m 8s):
So like you're eating before your body's even allowing, understanding the signals of satiety, and you're, then you're just become, like, then you're just overeating at that point. So give yourself time. Eating slowly helps you feel more satisfied and essentially give, gives yourself enough time to, to signal that you're full. So that's point number one. Point number two, improved digestion. Eating slowly helps our digestion. And this is an observational study that was done at University of Rhode Island, examined how eating speed affected the early stages of the digesting digestive processing by observing 60 young adults eat a meal.
Brian (5m 51s):
The slow eaters consumed two ounces of food per minute. The medium speed eaters consumed two and a half ounces of food per minute, and the fast eaters consumed 3.1 ounces per minute. They also, the, the fast eaters took larger bites and chewed less before swallowing. So this means that not only are the fast eaters putting more food down in a given amount of time, that food isn't being processed as much, which is, you know, another big thing is you gotta make sure that you chew your food so you're not having like, essentially big lumps of food being digested in your stomach and your small intestine and things like that. So that was an obs ob observational study.
Brian (6m 33s):
Imagine, you know, the amount of food over time if you're, you know, as far as calories is concerned, if you're, if you're eating slower as opposed to eating faster, those fast eaters are just blindly eating and consuming that many more calories over a period of time. And that can obviously play a role in weight loss gain or just maintaining. So what they found also was that eating helps you eat less, which I just mentioned smaller portions, right? So essentially there was another observational study at the University of Rhode Island where they had 30 normal women with normal weight, women they both ate, just see it consisted of plate of pasta with tomato vegetable sauce and some Parmesan and a glass of water.
Brian (7m 21s):
Each visit. Researchers instructed the women to eat the, to the point of comfortable fullness during one, but during one visit they also were told them to eat as quickly as possible while on other visit, other times they visited, they asked them to eat slowly and to put down their utensils between bites, which is another nice tip when the researchers compared the difference in food consumption between the quickly eaten lunch and the slowly eaten lunch. Here's what they found when eating quickly, the women consumed 646 calories in nine minutes when eating slowly, the women consumed 579 calories in 29 minutes. So that's 67 less calories in 20 more minutes.
Brian (8m 4s):
So if you sort of extra extrapolate that over time to three meals, you can see how quickly those calories can really add up. So take that nine minute meal and push it another 20 minutes and they actually consume less calories in 20 more minutes of eating. Okay? So that as an observational study, I think that's pretty, pretty convincing that, you know, eating slowly can really help you sort of control your calories in a positive benefit. I'm not talking about really restricting, restricting, but when you're eating slowly, you're, you're understanding what true hunger and what true satiety is, and it's a great way to sort of control that.
Brian (8m 53s):
So the bottom line is, I think as you're sort of tall, is eating slowly makes for better digestion, easier weight maintenance, and much greater satisfaction from our foods, from our meals. So some tips to come from that. I remember one tip and I, and I, I can't remember who mentioned it to me, but eating one, one tip you could try is eating with chopsticks, right? Because unless you're like a wizard with chopsticks and I'm not, this will really help you slow down as, as opposed to, you know, just piling in, you know, taking a fork and piling it in your mouth. So that's one tip is, is eating with chopsticks. Another one is sitting down to eat in a calm environment with minimal distractions instead of driving while, you know, eating while driving or while watching TV or while texting, you know, you sort of pay attention to your food and your present there with it.
Brian (9m 48s):
Another sort of tip to help slow digestion and make, make it, you know, that much, take you that much more time to eat is, you know, having some foods with some fiber in them can help as well, right? And you know, whether that's fruits or vegetables or whatever it is. So that can help as well. Putting down your utensils between bites can help take a moment and take a breath and then enjoy. For myself, what I try to do sometimes is just I'll, I'll be eating, well eating at dinner and then sometimes I'll just get up and, you know, maybe take the dogs out or do something and then come back and then finish eating. And it, it does help for sure to just find something to do, whether that's, you know, through a conversation or getting up for a little bit and coming back using smaller pa plates or like I mentioned, different utensils such as chopsticks.
Brian (10m 42s):
So if you, if you find yourself rushing, I think it's important to adapt to one of these principles and it can go a long way over time. Okay, so set aside, set aside a time to eat, just like you set aside a time to do anything else and whether that could be, you know, I would say anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes for each meal would be preferably even longer for like dinner. The bigger meals I think can really help and you're setting your side time to eat, to spend time with family, friends and away from your phones and not just on the run. So those are some tips to help. Those are, those are just one that give you some observational studies that were done and if you have any questions regarding this, let me know.
Brian (11m 28s):
I think it's fairly simple. It's one of those simple things that everyone can do, but not everyone will do. So hopefully you can implement this into your life and it could really make an impact as it's shown through some of those ob observational studies that I re, that I referenced. So I hope you're enjoying this. Let me know if you have any questions. Feel free to leave a review in any, you know, Spotify, apple, iTunes, whatever it is. And you will start seeing, I do have a book out coming out Step Ladder system, really excited for it. So I'll, there are some links in the show notes for that as well. And yeah, if you have any questions, feel free to email me, brian brian.com. So let's, let's make it a habit and eat slowly and message me if you're gonna start implementing this into your life, cuz I think it can make a big impact and everyone can do it.
Brian (12m 15s):
So have a great rest of the day and I will talk Dan Friday with a great interview. Thanks for listening to the Get Lean ean podcast. I understand there are millions of other podcasts out there and you've chosen to listen to mine and I appreciate that. Check out the show notes@briangrin.com for everything that was mentioned in this episode. Feel free to subscribe to the podcast and share it with a friend or family member that's looking to get their body back to what it once was. Thanks again and have a great day.
