eat your food in the right order
Different foods have different digestion times. How can we make sure that we present the food to our body in an optimised way, to reduce the digestion energy. Our meals generally comprise of a mix of different foods, eaten in the same time. There are practical ways how to combine different foods. The easiest way to optimise our digestion process, is to eat the food in the right order. This is called "sequential eating".
This means that we shall eat and finish one food at a time, before going to the next one. Our digestion system works in a "strata" formation, thus each type of food is digested in the order in which it is eaten. Food does not co-mingle in our stomach unless it is eaten mixed up. When we eat one food at a time, the food remains layered in our stomach, and it is then digested one layer at a time.
Sequential eating doesn't require to change the kind of food you are usually eating (whether healthy of not). It is just a matter of eating it in the right order or sequence. I agree, it is not so easy to give up our eating habits, but just giving sequential eating a try for one week will already improve digestion, increase your body's ability to absorb more nutrients and will result in an overall good feeling. In addition, one of the main benefits of sequential eating is weight loss. If each mouthful of food, we are usually eating, consist of different foods and gets mixed up in your stomach, our appetite is constantly stimulated. This leads automatically to the consumption of more food than needed, to meet our bodies' requirements. With sequential eating, even by keeping a conventional diet, we will lose weight because we eat less.
How to do it
The objective is to reduce the energy, our body requires for digestion. So, we have to eat our food in sequences and more important we shall define the right order of eating the food. Below listed are the simple guidelines for sequential eating during lunch or dinner:
Do not drink during your meal. Most beverages will dilute and wash away the enzymes needed for proper digestion.
Better drink one big glass of water before the meal.
Start your meal with the most watery food and end it with the least watery. So start with the soup and not with bread and olive oil.
Continue your meal with the raw salad vegetables using little or no salad dressing or oil. Better to take lemon juice instead.
If you like acidic fruits, eat them after the raw vegetables but before you eat any cooked foods containing starch, protein or fat.
After that eat the cooked or steamed vegetables. First the leafy ones, then the more dense ones and after that the root vegetables.
At last you may eat the proteins, such as fish or meat at the end of the meal. Make sure you eat only one kind of protein per meal.
If you need to eat bread, do it together with the proteins.
Do not consume sugars (e.g. dessert), syrups, fresh fruits or dried fruits after a meal that has fat, starch or protein.
Sequential eating is not difficult to put into practice. It is a first step to an easier food digestion. It is directly related to the principles of proper "food combining", which is the topic of other posts to come in this section of the blog. So, stay on board and enjoy eating.