Eating well also means listening to your body

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Extract from the article: There's no single definition of eating well. To « eat well », you need to take several parameters into account. First and foremost, you need to apply the nutritional recommendations for a balanced, diversified diet.

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There's no single definition of eating well. To « eat well », you need to take several parameters into account. First and foremost, you need to apply the nutritional recommendations for a balanced, diversified diet.

These recommendations follow 5 main principles: Reduce fat, salt and sugar consumption. At the same time, significantly increase consumption of fruit and vegetables. Reduce consumption of processed and ultra-processed foods as much as possible, and prepare dishes yourself using raw or minimally processed foods. Limit snacking as much as possible. Finally, drink mainly water and avoid all forms of sweetened beverages as much as possible.

These nutritional recommendations help us to know what to eat, but to eat well, we need to go further and take into account 3 other very important notions: Identify why you want to eat. Choosing the environment in which to eat. Finally, don't forget that eating should be a pleasure.

Eating according to need

Adeline Hage, dietician in Lille (France) makes it clear: « The human body is a wonderful machine. Great enough to send us signals that correspond to our needs.This is the case with the sensation of hunger, which gives us the signal that we need energy, and the sensation of satiation, which sends us the signal that we have consumed enough energy to cover our nutritional needs and energy expenditure. But this formidable machine can be disrupted, in particular by an excess of sugar, the famous hunger associated with glycemic peaks ».

« In nature, sweet products are rare and contain a lot of energy.In a world where food was not yet abundant, it's normal that our ancestors had a particular appetite for these foods: it was a survival instinct.We have inherited this instinct, but now that sugar is everywhere, we no longer meet the real needs expressed by our bodies.So you have to make the effort to think about what your body is telling you, and wait until you're feeling peckish before you eat.But don't worry: making the effort quickly becomes a very comfortable habit to which we no longer pay attention », she continues.

How can you tell if you really need to eat?

To identify whether you really need to eat, you need to learn to listen to your body. This will enable you to listen to your sensations when you eat, but also when you drink, to better understand the effect of food and hydration on your energy, thoughts and moods.This is central to understanding whether we're eating out of hunger, boredom or stress, and therefore to recognizing the need to satisfy a real hunger from a more emotional one. To put this into practice, we recommend two exercises: Firstly, before you start eating, focus your attention on your breathing, so that you can observe the sensations around your belly and relate these to the needs your body is expressing: is it asking you to satisfy a small, medium or large hunger, or is it just asking you to satisfy stress or boredom without the presence of real hunger? Then, while you're eating, pay attention to the effect of what you're ingesting on your senses: hearing, smell, taste and the sensations produced in your body.This will enable us to analyze whether we are satisfying our taste for a food, our hunger, or relieving our stress.

Why differentiate between taste and hunger?

The taste for a food is the desire for it. If we focus solely on this taste, we'll swallow the food, then take more and so on, without paying attention to our real hunger, and end up overeating. On the other hand, if we focus on our real hunger, we'll eat until we lose the sensation of hunger, then naturally stop without overeating.

Are there any environments to be favored for eating well?

Today, we know that you should absolutely avoid eating at your desk, in front of your computer screen, or at home in front of the TV. The risk is that you'll eat more and put on more weight, whether you're a child or an adult. If we eat in front of a screen, it will absorb and focus all our attention, causing us to eat more than we should, without paying attention to the satiety signals sent by the body. We'll eat more during that meal, without our mind really accounting for all that's been ingested, and we'll eat more at the next meal, even if we're not in front of a screen, because the body will compensate for what it thinks it didn't absorb at the previous meal.

What are the recommendations?

To sum up, to eat well, you need to eat a balanced and varied diet in a calm environment, around a table with no screens on. You also need to listen to your body before you start eating and during the meal. And don't forget to eat slowly, as it takes around 30 minutes for the brain to realize that it's full. Finally, even if eating responds to our body's needs, we mustn't forget that eating is also a pleasure

.Jean ELI

Source : Stéphane Besançon, Nutritionist/Priorité Santé-RFI