Food combining can be a new revelation. A new chapter… a new way of looking at food more intimately.
As we digest our food, the enzymes we produce are unique for each food. Organizing how we eat our food helps our bodies have higher functioning. Breaking down food by the most complex to the least and reserving some ingredients for ingesting at other times fosters good nutrient absorption and care in minimizing gas, bloating, and over-eating.
Food combining may seem a bit fussy. However, if you are having digestive concerns, this and the way you eat are the first course of actions to bring balance to your digestion. Food digests at varying rates. When we eat complicated meals with ingredients that do not digest in the same way, we create taxation on our digestive system. Additionally, we may create an inability to digest some things, as they may begin to decompose in our stomach and create toxins in our bodies.
Ugh, right?
Food combining example
Just to illuminate this further, I’ll share an example when you are super hungry and you make a sandwich including: bread, turkey, mayo, lettuce, tomato, pickles, olive tapanede, roasted tomatoes, balsamic vinegar, and raw onion. This is the kind of sandwich I have had in the past from a take-away eatery. Many people eat these kinds of sandwiches. It sounds kind of yummy for some. I have moved passed this kind of lunch. Because what is going on here, is the protein in the turkey breaks down more slowly than the bread. The raw ingredients break down more more slowly than the cured and pickled ingredients. This kind of sandwich will be complicated to break down and most likely will result in some fermentation of the ingredients which are easier to digest (bread, and cured vegetables).
What this means is there will be undigested food later in the digestive tract, which will create ama (in Sanskrit, this means “that which is undigested”), floating in the digestive tract, eventually making it to the blood stream, and most likely taking the form of bloating, fatigue in joints, acne, and skin rashes. Maybe even headaches, depending upon how many sandwiches are eaten like this through the week. This can evolve into a condition some have termed “leaky gut”.
Leaky gut is a condition that is now recognized by modern Western medical doctors. Check out this article explaining the digestive tract permeability here. You don’t want to get into this situation. If you have leaky gut, it will take some time to undo this. However, it is a great action to begin reversing this state of being with a deep reflections on what you eat and how you feel. Connecting to the senses are the key to disease reversing action.
Keeping a Food Journal
Analyzing a week-long food journal (printable journal entry below) could indicate how much ama may be building up. Tracing this back to how you are nourishing yourself can be so helpful because you can change this easily! What we choose to eat is fairly simple to shift up, right? Removing the obstacles of the habits in place to get you re-oriented to eating simpler food combinations and changing your body’s chemistry a bit with expectations for mealtimes.
Adding the dynamic of emotions and keeping track of how you feel while you are eating will enliven your senses. Sense awareness is one key to reconnecting with the body’s digestion and doing needed self-reflection to change this foundational habit in the body. This is the beginning to enhancing your taste buds and getting on the road to vitality.
Reading through and the Food Combining tool (below) can help you re-orient your eating habits to include the outcomes of a slimmer figure, clarity of the mind, glowing skin, and more vitality in our bodies. You can feel better and eliminate any gas, bloating, or burping that may be a result of poor food combining.
