Our Complete Spotlight on Body Ecology Series!

1. Exhausted? Overweight? Under the Weather? The Body Ecology Principles Hold the Key to Your Health!
2. Beat Uncontrollable Sugar Cravings with The Principle of Step By Step!
3. Step by Step – Healthy Living Essentials: How to Fight Stress and Get Your Beauty Sleep!
4. The 80/20 Principle Part I: Think Twice Before You Reach for That Hamburger!
5. Animal Proteins Part II: Does Milk Really Do Your Body Good?
6. Good Carbs and Bad Carbs – What You Don’t Know IS Hurting You
7. Is It Fat or Fiction?
8. Stuff Your Holiday Turkey - Not Your Tummy (GETTING STARTED ON THE BODY ECOLOGY DIET)
9. The Principle of Food Combining: The Meat of It - Without the Bread (GETTING STARTED ON THE BODY ECOLOGY DIET)
10. The Principle of Food Combining Part 2: Fruit-ful Advice

It’s the time of year when we all enjoy being with our families and indulging in colorful and delicious meals. It’s okay if you choose to relax some of the rules, just make sure that you’re not harming your health by overeating!

This is the 8th installment in our ongoing and highly requested article series Spotlight on Body Ecology, designed to help you better understand the principles of The Body Ecology Diet.

Once again fall is here, and with changing leaves and cooler temperatures, anticipation begins to rise for the festive holidays just around the corner.

Forget the bikini body and diet ads – ‘tis the season of colorful magazine covers depicting mouthwatering images of lavish Thanksgiving feasts and enticing recipe ideas for stuffing, cranberries, and pumpkins that promise to delight your taste buds.

While some of you can’t wait, others may be anxious about the upcoming temptations of the season.

Relax! If you want to be flexible with your healthy eating rules for Thanksgiving and Christmas, you should. After all, the holidays should be times of fun meal preparations, enjoyment of the rewards, and cherished memory building, not guilt or deprivation.

Just don’t lose control and overindulge. Especially with Thanksgiving meals, it seems that eating until you are slumped on the couch with your belt unbuckled, half awake, and barely breathing has become as much a part of the tradition as stuffed turkey and pumpkin pie.

Indulgence can easily become OVERindulgence and feel like punishment; whether it’s a special occasion or not,overeating is always a bad idea.

This is why the upcoming season presents the perfect time for us to highlight the second component of The Principle of 80/20, which addresses how to eat to allow maximum efficiency during your digestion. Keep in mind that it’s a principle to live by on a daily basis.

Be Kind to Your Stomach

A healthy digestive tract is essential to good health, and many people have weakened and worn down their digestive systems by overeating at meals.
Your stomach needs room to do its job well, and it has three specific tasks in the digestive process.

• First, it stores food and liquid. It does this by relaxing the muscles of its upper portion to accept swallowed foods.
• Then, it must mix up and churn the foods and liquids along with the digestive juices it produces. Again, this is done through muscle actions in the lower part of the stomach.
• Lastly, it slowly empties the contents of your stomach into your small intestine.

If you eat until you are completely full or overfull, your overworked stomach is unable to contract and properly mix the food you have eaten with its own digestive juices designed to begin breaking down nutrients.

This slows down digestion tremendously, leading to food sitting in your stomach, where it begins to ferment, creating sugars that pathogenic yeast like candida thrive on.

The principle of 80/20 states that you should eat until your stomach is 80% full, leaving 20% room for your stomach to do its job.

If you are trying to get healthy and heal your digestion, abiding by this principle is CRUCIAL – and yes, even when you are eating healthy foods.

In fact, allowing the natural complex sugars in starchy vegetables or grains that you eat on the Body Ecology Diet to ferment will encourage candida overgrowth, and for this reason, overeating these foods is especially hazardous.

So how can you make sure you don’t overeat?

Excellent question! Being able to listen to your body’s cues takes practice and time.

Here are a few tips:

• Slow down: Although we just outlined what your stomach does in 3 seemingly easy steps, digestion is a complex process involving the interaction and cooperation of many hormones and enzymes. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to signal that you’ve had enough. That’s why when you eat on the run or gobble a meal down in 10 minutes, as so many do these days, you are more likely to overeat without knowing it.

  Instead, make meal time a pleasurable experience where you savor and are mindful of each bite you put into your mouth. In order to digest properly, your body needs to be in a calm and relaxed mode, rather than a “flight or fight” mode. Eating too fast while stressed and on the run can shut down your digestion and create long-term serious harm to your inner ecosystem.

• Chew your food thoroughly: Digestion starts in your mouth when your saliva begins to break down your food. Not only will chewing thoroughly slow you down, you will fully taste your food to help you feel satisfied sooner.
• Fight portion distortion: In the last 30 years, restaurants have increased the average portion to 2 to 3 times of what it used to be, and cookbooks have begun to increase recipe sizes to accommodate our distorted views of what a normal serving is.

  Keep in mind that a portion of meat is about the size of a deck of cards, not a textbook, and that a serving of grain is about the size of a tennis ball.

  If you are practicing the principle of 80/20, your plate will include one serving of meat or grain (not both) and 4 servings of vegetables (garden, sea, and fermented veggies).

• Remember that you can eat again! Just stop eating once you’re not hungry anymore. There isn’t any rule that says you can’t eat or have a snack in 2 hours if you get hungry. Gradually, as the Step by Step Principle reminds us, you will get to know how much food your stomach can hold and how much you need to get through a busy morning or afternoon.

Staying on Track with Body Ecology

Some of you may be experiencing symptoms of poor digestive health, like bloating or gas after a meal, even when you’re not overeating. Digestive enzymes like Body Ecology’s Assist Full Spectrum,Assist Dairy and Protein, and Assist SI (Small Intestine) are amust to help correct your digestion. With their mix of powerful and fast-acting formulas designed to help your stomach break down food and absorb nutrients, they can help you get on the right path to health!

If you’re new to Body Ecology, are still healing your digestive system, and would like to stay on track, read Hot Tips for Healthy Thanksgiving Meal, which includes some delicious recipes as well!

As we’ve said time and time again, proper digestion is one of the most important issues to address when you are healing your inner ecosystem to attain top notch health and vitality.

If you want to give your digestive system an extra boost, don’t forget to include fermented foods and probiotic drinks in your meals, and consider trying Body Ecology’s digestive enzymes to help correct your digestion.

• Assist Full Spectrum Enzymes are designed to help you digest nearly any food you eat, including vegetables and fruit. They are the most complete digestive enzymes on the market, and you’ll definitely notice you have more energy and better elimination.
• Assist Dairy and Protein is formulated with enzymes to help with digesting animal and vegetable proteins, as well as dairy products (although we don’t recommend dairy in stage one of Body Ecology). This potent supplement has plenty of hydrochloric acid to break down fats and proteins in your meals.
• Assist SI (Small Intestine) maximizes the absorption of the food you eat by breaking down proteins, carbohydrates, and fats in the Small Intestine, when most of the enzymes work only in the stomach. Increase assimilation, minimize undigested matter, and reduce toxicity.

Finally, remember that achieving great health is a step-by-step process and a lifelong commitment. There will always be temptations. You might cheat on some days, and that’s okay, as long as you step right back on track!

WHAT TO REMEMBER MOST FROM THIS ARTICLE:

The Principle of 80/20 shows you how to eat mindfully and maximize your digestive powers! This is a principle to use on a daily basis, which can also serve you well to prevent overeating during the holidays. It does take time to practice this principle, so we encourage you to learn to listen to your body. You can also make the digestive process easier by using Body Ecology digestive enzymes to aid in digestion. This way, you won't have to worry about a "turkey coma" this holiday season. What a relief!

Stay tuned for our next article in the exclusive Spotlight on Body Ecology series!

Here is what yet another happy Body Ecology tribe member had to say!

Since April I have lost 15 pounds and just found out that I've lowered my cholesterol by nearly 25 points ... all by following principles of the Body Ecology Diet!!! Still trying to figure out some of my health issues, but feeling great today and rather proud of myself!! -Sharon M., Facebook Fan Page