Eat Less
If you are looking for an ideal way to control your appetite, consider this old wives’ tale: chewing your food ten times before you swallow can help you eat less. The theory behind this is becoming part of a diet trend that is rapidly growing in popularity.
To understand how you can control your appetite and eat less simply by chewing more, you need to understand how your appetite works. Chemical signals are transferred to your brain from a variety of sources including your stomach, although it is also controlled by your hypothalamus, a gland in your brain.
As you chew and swallow your food, your appetite decreases as symptoms of fullness reach your brain. However, it can take up to twenty minutes for the signals from your stomach to reach your brain. This can cause you to overeat before you realize that your appetite has been satisfied. In order to eat less, you need to find a way to allow the signals to reach your brain before you have gorged yourself to the point of discomfort.
There are a few tricks and tips to use chewing to eat less and control your appetite. One is to determine how many times you want to chew your food before you swallow it. Or, you can time yourself, in that you will chew for ten, twenty or even thirty seconds before you swallow. This gives your stomach plenty of time to receive messages from your stomach so you can eat less because you stop eating when you are full.
There are a couple of benefits to chewing more besides controlling your appetite and making you eat less. The act of extended chewing can help aid your digestion and make it more efficient. When you chew more, the food will be broken down when it reaches your stomach and the food can travel through your digestive system more efficiently. While this won’t help control your appetite or help you eat less, it can help improve your overall health.
You may also find that what you enjoy eating will change as you chew more. Many of the high fat, high sodium processed foods that people love are enjoyed only because we gulp them down and don’t pay attention to what we eat. If you are forced to chew more, you will taste the food’s true flavors and this can be unpleasant if you eat a lot of processed or chemical laden foods. The benefit to your health is that you might lose your appetite for these foods and eat less of them in the end.
You may be amazed at what effect chewing more can have on your appetite. While it is true that chewing your food ten times before swallowing is regarded as an old wives tale, there is now a massive amount of solid science that backs this claim up. Whether you want to control your appetite so that you eat less as part of a weight loss program or whether you want to improve your digestion and your diet by choosing to eat less processed food, you may find that opting to chew your food more can help give the results you are looking for.
Will Lee
Physician Network Writer
