Can
you remember a time, a specific time, when you have nearly had to
carry your stomach from the eating table, you are so full? And then
you’ve had to sit down or doze until you feel well enough to
continue with life.
Our
society is all about eating. Never in our history have we had so much
to choose from for food. It's called 'the omnivores dilemma'. So how
much is the right quantity of food?
If
you’re ever lucky enough to eat with Okinawan elders, you’ll
learn about their habit called hara hachi bu, which means eat
only until you are 80 per cent full. Stopping at 80 per cent capacity
is actually a very good strategy in order to avoid putting on weight without
going hungry. Why? The stomach’s stretch receptors take about 20
minutes to tell the body how full it really is, so 20 minutes after
stopping eating is when you will really feel full.
The
traditional Okinawan diet, with its emphasis on vegetables, whole
grains, fruits, legumes (soy foods) and fish, with limited amounts of
lean meats, serves as a model for healthy eating and healthy aging
that also reduces your risk of cardiovascular disease.
In
Okinawa, heart disease rates are 80 per cent lower, and stroke rates
significantly lower than in the United States. Cholesterol levels are
typically lower; homocysteine levels are low; and blood pressure
tends to be at goal levels. Rates of cancer are 50–80 per cent
lower especially breast, colon, ovarian and prostate cancer. The
incidence of hip fractures is 20 per cent lower than for mainland
Japanese and 40 per cent lower than in the United States. Dementia is
rare. Interestingly enough, if an Okinawan moves to mainland
Japan and starts to eat the traditional Japanese diet, these
advantages disappear.
Eat
with the Sardinian elders and you’ll find a similar story. They
regularly live to over a hundred years old. One of their secrets is
that they consume on average 2000 calories per day.
Studies
in mice have also found that a low-calorie diet can extend lifespan.
Normally fed elderly mice have been compared with age-matched mice
that have been subject to caloric restriction from 2 months of age.
The calorie-restricted mice are known to age at a slower rate and to
live approximately 40 per cent longer than do the mice in the control
groups.
This
phenomenon is thought to have evolved to promote survival in a harsh
environment where there are poor prospects of reproduction.
We
humans are likely to overeat in response to our circumstances,
friends, family, plate size, occasions, day of the week or because it
is Christmas. We are trained to eat until we are full rather than the
Okinawan way of eating only until we are no longer hungry.
What
can we do? There are all kinds of little tricks you can use on
yourself to modify your eating.
- Two of my friends lost a whole heap of weight together. When I questioned them about how they’d gone about it, they explained that they hadn’t changed any of the foods they were eating, they just chose to eat off side plates instead of dinner plates. Good idea.
- Serve yourself and others, then put the food away before you sit down to eat. That reduces the temptation to have seconds even though you are not hungry.
- Don’t cook extra food; you’ll feel like you need to eat it. We’re all aware that some people don’t have enough food, so who wants to waste it? Spread food out on your plate so it looks like there’s plenty of it. Studies have found that if you think you are eating a big meal, you’ll feel just as full at the end.
- Eat mindfully. Have you ever had a meal watching TV, on the computer or on the phone and can’t remember the actual experience of eating? Eat slowly, eat in a peaceful place and chew your food up well. Have a seat and focus on the food. This has been shown to increase satiety by between 10 and 15 per cent.
- Another trick is to put your knife and fork down between mouthfuls. My mother used to say: ‘Don’t wolf it down.’ Have we turned into a nation of wolves? Slow down and enjoy the moment.
To
give you an idea: if you bunch your two fists together, this is the
size of your stomach. This is the amount of food we should not exceed at each meal. There
are a few exceptions to this when people are aiming at putting on
weight or recovering from illness but for the rest of us, stick to
two fistfuls of well-balanced food.
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