Читать книгу The Viva Mayr Diet: 14 days to a flatter stomach and a younger you - Dr Stossier Harald - Страница 48
ОглавлениеYou are about to discover:
Why you need to eat slowly and chew your food properly
How to chew your food properly
Why chewing is the single most important thing you can do for your digestion and general health
Lunch
Courgette soup, and grilled chicken on hash-browned potatoes and vegetables with fresh herb oil (see here)
Dinner
Buckwheat blinis with vegetable cubes (see here)
The focus of today’s chapter is chewing; one of the pillars of the Viva Mayr Diet, and possibly its most crucial element. If you take one thing away with you from this book it should be the ability to chew your food properly.
Chewing properly is the key to the Viva Mayr way, and also the key to losing weight quickly, and encouraging overall health and well-being. When you chew more, you eat less because your brain sends signals telling you that you’ve had enough. This means you get thinner faster. It also means you eat less because the nutrients from the food are absorbed more effectively, and your body craves less food to live on. What’s more, chewing efficiently and for the right length of time encourages your body to absorb the nutrients in your food, which means you’ll be getting far more from the food you eat, which enhances your health on all levels.
OK. This is it. This is where the Viva Mayr Diet begins in earnest. This is the morning routine you will follow for today, for the rest of the diet and, hopefully, the rest of your life. Are you ready? You’re going to feel great at the end of today – you’re going to experience a real sense of achievement, a feeling that you are finally doing something positive about your weight and your health.
You will have started your day with a cup of water – hot or at room temperature. Drink this half an hour before breakfast (which will give you the chance to read the rest of the chapter or go for a shower). In the next chapter we’ll introduce you to some stretching exercises, but for now just gently try to touch your toes, then come up, vertebrae by vertebrae. Stretch your arms high up in the air, then stretch back down again.
Learning to chew
Now that you are feeling limber and refreshed, it’s time to get to grips with the art of chewing. Dr Stossier says that if you concentrate it should take you about three weeks to learn to chew properly. It might take even less. Let’s start straight away with breakfast. You may want to get up slightly earlier so that you can take longer over this crucial meal.
Begin with some bread that you prepared yesterday. If you haven’t had a chance to make the famous Viva Mayr spelt bread, then purchase some spelt or rye bread from your local health-food shop, which is rich in fibre and whole grains. These are good for your digestion, and encourage you to chew because they are denser than most commercially prepared breads. If all else fails, get a good-quality wholegrain bread from your supermarket.
Take a small piece of bread and put it in your mouth, and then slowly start chewing it. Focus on keeping it there as long as possible. If you’re anything like me it will disintegrate within about seven chews. Persevere, take another piece and start again. You’ll find that you become more adept at keeping the bread in your mouth, and eventually you will taste a sweetness that is the result of the carbohydrates turning to sugar. Move the bread around your mouth.
Now try the chewing exercise over a whole meal. Start with your breakfast, and continue to focus on your chewing for every meal throughout the day. They are all good chewing material!
You will notice that the Viva Mayr Diet is not an exclusion diet. It is not about cutting things out, like dairy products and wheat; rather, it is about learning how to eat them so they are easy to digest and therefore don’t cause you any problems.
Savour every mouthful
Take a small piece of your breakfast spelt (or other) bread and put it in your mouth. Really savour it. Remember that it needs to be totally disintegrated before you swallow it. Try to think about what it is you are eating, and the nutrients you are putting into your body. During breakfast you can take a little bit of herbal or green tea by the spoonful, but no water (the reasons for this will be explained a little later).
Eat some herbal spread with your bread, adding it to your mouth when you have chewed the bread, to mix it with the saliva you have produced. Swallow when your food is liquid.
Next start on the scrambled eggs. If you wish, you can toast your spelt bread and serve the eggs on top. Focus on achieving a real taste sensation, which only comes after extensive chewing. Keep moving the toast (or bread) and eggs around your mouth to avoid swallowing before you’ve reached at least 30 chews. Eventually you will taste a total mix of all of the elements, but it’s important to really taste the bread and the eggs. It is an intoxicating feeling and will motivate you to keep going. Later on in the book, when you move on to eating muesli for breakfast, you should aim to experience a similar sensation – savouring and really tasting the sweetness of the berries, the crunchiness of the grains and nuts, and the rich taste of whatever milk you choose.
Aim for 40 chews
Dr Stossier says he chews every mouthful between 30 and 40 times, at every meal. So it could be helpful to count at the beginning of your chewing training, to get you into the rhythm of it. At first you will only manage around 15, but this soon improves. Dr Stossier insists that chewing is one of the most crucial things you can do, because if you don’t get the hang of this, nothing else will work. As he puts it, ‘Forgetting to chew in your mouth and expecting your stomach to chew your food instead is not an option.’
