Digestion starts in the brain

BOING!

I just had a light bulb moment while eating my lunch. 

On my last blog post, I'm tweaking, not twerking, I talked about making tweaks to my diet by crowding out the "avoid" foods based on my O+ type blood. In preparation to do this, I purchased the Eat Right 4 Your Type cookbook for my iPad and this afternoon I was perusing the pages, looking for yummy recipes and making a shopping list. This is something I have done 1,000 times before. Whenever I would start a new diet, I would do intensive research on what to eat and what not to eat. I would scour the web looking for recipes so I could do meal planning. I would make an extremely long shopping list and head to the grocery store to buy all the "approved" foods. Then I would cross my fingers and pray that this diet would work. 

It's funny how it's so easy to slip back into the old diet mentality. 

This ritual of preparing to diet is second nature to me. I didn't realize what I was doing until I had an almost painful experience eating my "last meal."

Side bar: If you're a dieter, you know what the last meal is. It's that last meal where you eat the foods that you're about to avoid for the next [insert length of diet program] all at one time! Yea, I had one of THOSE meals for lunch today. 

Now, back to the painful experience eating my last meal which consisted of:

• A vegetarian fed hamburger patty (only grass-fed beef on the new diet)
• 2 slices of provolone cheese (no dairy on the new diet)
• the last 2 slices of bacon (no pork on the new diet)
• sauteed button mushrooms (no domestically grown mushrooms on the new diet)
• BBQ sauce (the sauce I used contains vinegar which is a no no on the new diet)
• 2 slices of brown rice flour bread (this is acceptable on the new diet)
• baked sweet potato fries (this is acceptable on the new diet)

As I sat down at the table to enjoy a yummy meal, I was plagued with negative thoughts about my meal. 

"Is this bacon going to react like a poison in my system?"
"What exactly is a vegetarian fed cow and is the one I'm eating going to mess up my stomach?"
"Oh, I should have put cheddar on this last meal sandwich instead of provolone."  
"Oh man, I may never eat cheddar cheese again."
"What am I going to eat on my eggs if I can't eat cheddar cheese? Oh wait,  I can't eat eggs."

While all these thoughts were circling around in my head, I still attempted to eat mindfully, by eating slowly and breathing between bites, but I wasn't able to enjoy the meal. About four bites into it, I felt the what-should-have-been-a-delicious-burger start to back up in my throat. I ignored the feeling and took another bite. Again, I felt something gurgling in my esophagus.  So much so, that I started to cough.

Do you think that stopped me from eating? Heck no! This was my last meal and I was going to enjoy it come hell or high water!

Wait? What was I doing to myself? My body was clearly telling me that something wasn't right and I chose to ignore it. Why? Because diet means deprivation and if I stopped eating at that point, I would feel deprived. 

That was my a-ha moment.

I fell right back into the same pattern which I have been trying to avoid. I started to stress about this new diet and the food that I think I should be avoiding, that my body rebelled and actually tried to reject what I was eating. 

Just today, I heard someone say that digestion starts in the brain and this is a perfect example of that. My crazy diet thoughts put my body in a low grade state of stress while I was eating and my body was unable to digest and absorb the meal. 

Crazy, right? Well, it's not. Digestion is inarguably a physiological process.

"Here's the deal: when you are in fight-or-flight mode (sympathetic dominant), you will not digest your food well. Period. End of story. Do not pass GO, do not collect $200."

Evidence that this is true: 

1. I didn't enjoy the taste of the meal like I should have.
2. I experienced acid reflux in the middle of my meal!

See, this is yet another reason dieting does not work. So what is my plan now, you ask? After this a-ha moment, I thought about this very question. Here's my answer. I'm going to decrease the frequency and amount of some of the food "avoid" foods, but I am not going to cut them out completely. Nor, am I going to categorize them into the good food/bad food choices; or as Dr. D'Adamo refers to them as beneficial, neutral and avoid foods. 

At the end of the day, my body will tell me what it needs and what it wants. The last thing I want to do is stress about the food that I put in my mouth. I'm going to focus on relaxing and enjoying my food and stop wondering what if...

Who knew eating would be this complicated!