What to Eat When: Earlier, Lighter Dinners Really Do Matter.

If you are really interested in creating measureable improvements in diet, sleep and energy, within 10 weeks, it’s important to look at order. What you do when really does count.

Why is is important to have Earlier, Lighter Dinners; the first habit in the Body Thrive course?

Many of us think we have it nailed. It’s all about the nature of the food we consume. Right????

Well no actually. When we eat is just as important as what we eat. It’s all about efficiency and looking at when our digestion is strongest. If we are eating food at at a time of day when our body doesn’t have enough bile to deal
with it, we are shooting ourselves in the foot.

Why not try making yourself a guinea pig. Experiment with when you eat.

• The night before you want to have a great day in body, mind, and spirit; eat an earlier, lighter dinner.
• If you regularly eat a heavier dinner and try to wake early to exercise or do yoga, your practice won’t progress. It’s the less extreme version of slumping on the couch to watch TV after a Christmas Dinner.
• Hit your mat on an empty stomach or after a pint of fresh green juice and your body may be very happy to twist, bend, and go upside down.
• Order is crucial.
• Start with the night before the day you want to feel like a million bucks.

Our modern world provides us with so much to be processed from all five senses. There is so much that is valuable too. We need to get efficient with our processing but how we do that?

We have to get smart!

• If you eat nutrient-rich food at the wrong time of day, your body can’t digest the nutrients.
• Just by eating a little lighter and a little earlier in the evening we can take a lot of the load off our physiology.

It’s not just a fashion statement; less really is more. Even if it’s counter-culture. If your schedule is inefficient for your body, you’ll always feel behind. You’ll feel like you’re perpetually trying to keep up — that there isn’t enough time in your day for what you need to do. Let’s dive into why.

It’s about agni and ama. These Ayurvedic terms might be unfamiliar to some but stick with this ancient wisdom and see it sense it makes in our modern day world.

Agni

• Is the capacity that governs metabolism and digestion. To stay alive our food needs to be digested absorbed and assimilated. All of this happens courtesy of our Agni.
• Has it’s peaks and troughs and looking at these is helpful when deciding when our digestive powers are going to be optimal. The middle of the day is the best time of day to digest.
• Trying to digest a lot of food after the sun goes down is simply going to leave you depleted and if you allow this depletion to continue unchecked you will develop ama.

Ama

• Is the gunky residue left over from poorly digested food.
• Leads to energy inefficiency and disease.

When you eat too much too late, the next morning when you wake up, you will be more stiff, more groggy, and already behind. This feeling of being behind. being out of synch is something many in modern society suffer from, stress. This physical and psychological stress in our body generates inflammation and this leads to disease.

The solution is to eat when your Agni is optimal. According to Ayurveda, diurnal primates (that includes us) have strongest digestion between 10 am and 2 pm. It’s really a no brainer that we should eat our most nutrient loaded meal at that time.

We can give ourselves many reasonable sounding excuses for not eating our most nutrient loaded meal at that time but the fact is that for many of us eating heavy and late is just a habit. Given the epidemic levels of obesity, sleep disorders, and anxiety in our culture maybe it’s time to go counter-culture.

We really can influence what we experience on a day to day level. How do you want to feel in a decade? What habits do you want to pass down to your kids? What we eat when is going to shape all of these things.

Ok, so sold on the Earlier Lighter Dinners, but what the heck is on the menu??

• Keep it simple! Keeping your food preparation time to a minimum (think tasty soups and marinated salads) leaves time to do other things in the evening. Light movement. Sharing time with your family and friends.

When your daily habits are simple you will enjoy greater depth, connectedness, success and creativity in other areas of your life. The more simple rituals you create the more creative juice you free up. Having repetitive habits is incredibly energy efficient. By developing your habits you will create a reservoir of energy and free up your potential in life.

Highlights

4.45 Pause and remember that by eating a little lighter we take a load off our physiology and we can digest all the experiences of the day and we start to experience an increase in energy.

12.20 When you are not getting the results you desire in life investigate what you are doing and in what order you are doing it. If you have the right inputs but the wrong order you won’t get what you are after.

14.45 A pattern set in motion, stays in motion.

15.48 Turning heavy food into energy and bodily tissue after the sun goes down is recklessly taxing for your physiology.

17.20 This feeling of being behind/out of sync is the experience of stress. It’s physical and psychological stress. Stress creates inflammation.

19.05 Our cultural habits violate our bodies most basic needs!

20.05 We can influence how we experience and what we experience in our day to day journey.

22.10 When your day to day habits are simple and repetitive you can enjoy amazing depth success and connectedness in other areas of life