Hey Chicks,
Happy Wednesday!
It is now 2 days post Thanksgiving and I feel like I am finally emerging from my turkey coma! As my parents are divorced, I get a double dosage of dinner so I usually tend to throw all my healthy eating principles out of the window, eat everything in sight for 2 nights in a row (and get sent home with tons of leftovers!) then sit around and feeling guilty all week for eating too much. This year, I decided in advance I wasn’t going to have the “all or nothing” mentality. Not only did I throw in a 18km hike through Gatineau Park (I needed a buffer in case I wanted extra cake:) but I tried a new approach to eating my Thanksgiving dinner by following a Japanese eating principle my sister told me about called hara hachi bu. Here is the definition:
hara hachi bu – “eat until 80 percent full only”. Stopping at 80 percent capacity gives the stomach’s stretch receptors time to catch up since the stomach takes about 20 minutes to tell the body how full it really is.
Well, I think I probably ate until approximately 95% full on the second night but being aware of this principle while eating made me really focus on what my body was feeling during the meal. Alot of times I find that I dont even realize how much I have eaten and the next thing I know I feel like I am stuffed to the gills (this chick can eat serious quantities of everything including brussel sprouts… I love them!). Over time (And over eating processed foods!) a lot of us have lost how to read our body’s natural signals to let us know when we are full, hungry, thirsty, etc. It was very interesting to try to reconnect what I was feeling while I ate. Try it, chicks and let me know how you feel!
Striking a pose in Gatineau Park
Now I am off to do a bootcamp class to sweat up a storm…I did have the extra cake 🙂
Laura xo
