Improve Your Digestion to Improve Your Health

Can you guess the one function of your body that utilizes 75% of your energy each day?

You might think it is powering your muscles, pumping blood to your heart, or any number of other functions. But you'd probably be wrong.

It's digestion!

Imagine that...three quarters of your energy is used to process food.

And this is very important to think about because anything you can do to take some of that burden off of your digestive system will free up extra energy that your body can use for other things...such as immunity.

Although digestion is about what you eat, HOW you eat it is equally as important.

There are a number of things people unknowingly do to sabotage their digestion...and therefore their energy.

One of the main things is not chewing their food enough.

When you eat you probably aren't paying too much attention to how much you chew your food. You probably take large mouthfuls, chew a few times and then swallow.

If you're like most people, the food you eat is less than 25% broken down when you swallow it.

Do you remember when you were young and your Mother said to chew your food? It turns out she was right.

Our digestive system isn't designed to function optimally when we swallow our food whole, or barely broken down. Sure it can "handle it", but at the expense of your overall health and energy level.

Our body is designed for our teeth to grind down the food we eat and to mix it with saliva. This liquid substance is much easier for our digestive system to process.

Most people barely chew their food before they swallow it, which sends large chunks into their stomach to be digested.

Those large chunks of food are broken down with stomach acid and enzymes. But the added work of breaking down those larger pieces comes with an added expense to your system. It requires more work...and more energy.

Basically this extra work saps energy from other areas in your body. Your body has to work harder just to keep up.

Think of an assembly line for a minute. If everything is running smoothly, a certain number of units are produced. Now if you slow down the assembly line by requiring more manual processes, the total production will be reduced.

Sure things will still come off the line...but there will be fewer of them, and each one will have required more work.

One of the best ways to improve your digestion (YOUR assembly line) is to chew your food more.

And one of the easiest ways to remember to do this is to pick a number and chew each mouthful of food that many times before you swallow.

Your number could be 20, 35 or 72, it doesn't really matter.

What DOES matter is that you do this each time you eat until completely chewing your food becomes a habit. At that point you can stop counting.

Does this sound way too easy to really do anything?

Give it a try and see what happens. I'm sure you'll be pleasantly surprised.