Health begins with a healthy digestion. In this week’s Self-Love Practice: 3 Ways to Love Your Digestion, you will learn three easy ways to heal and rejuvenate your digestive system.
Video transcription:
Hello, Loves. This is Rachel Kieffer, of Health Nut Girl, helping women fall in love with a healthy life. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel.
Today’s self-love practice is three ways to love your digestion. I’m going to share with you three tips, three ways, to make your digestive system work better and in a healthier way.
The first one is to adjust your food choices to the seasons; to eat seasonally. I want you to think about if you would eat a lot of raw salads in the winter when it’s very cold and your body needs more nourishment and more warming foods. Or, if you eat foods that are very heavy in the summertime when it’s very hot. Your body is going to be out of balance; your digestive system is going to get out of balance. It will create a lot of digestive problems and a lot of health problems. Health begins with a healthy digestion. Think about how to adjust your eating, food choices, and preparations to the seasons. Eat lighter, more fresh and raw foods when the weather is warmer. Eat more warming foods, and foods that are cooked for longer during the times when it’s colder. Also, think about what grows locally in your area and that will give you a really good indication of how to make seasonal choices and eating foods that are appropriate for each season.
The second recommendation is to have a cut-off time. What I mean by that is, decide when is going to be your last meal of the day; when you’re going to stop eating during the day. It’s a very good idea to not eat late at night just before you go to sleep; because, what happens is your digestive system is going to be working while you’re sleeping. That is going to affect your sleep. That is going to affect the restfulness and the replenishment that you get during the night when your digestive system is working. Your body heals and repairs while you’re sleeping. If your digestive system is working, it gives energy to the digestion and not to the healing and repairing of your body. Also, you’re going to get up in the morning feeling kind of heavy, get digestive discomforts, and the discomforts that you can get in many different ways. Think of having a cut-off time; preferably a few hours before you go to sleep. Give yourself a flexible rule. You won’t follow it 100% of the time, but if you follow it 80% of the time, 90% of the time, that would be great. Give yourself a rule, “I’m not gonna eat after a certain hour in the day.” When you do that, you are going to be practicing, what I call, flexible intermittent fasting; which tells you to wait a big chunk of time between the last meal of the day and the first meal the following day. Really give your digestive system time to completely digest all your meals, eliminate, rest, repair, and rejuvenate before it starts working again the next day.
The third recommendation that I’m going to give you is to start every morning with warm water. A lot of times we love to drink things that are icy (water with a lot of ice) or water right out of the refrigerator. That actually makes our digestive system work really hard, because our digestive system needs to be at a certain temperature to digest our food. When we cool it, it needs to work really hard to warm up those foods and to warm up those icy foods and icy drinks. So think about helping your digestive system by drinking a glass of warm water first thing in the morning. It helps to cleanse it, flush it out, and it helps to keep that digestive fire going. You can add lemon juice to your water. I like to add lemon and ginger; just that little nourishment and little cleansing first thing in the morning.
So those are my three tips. I would love to hear from you, which one of them are you going to try. Let me know and I’m reminding you to please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I will see you at the next video.
xoxo Rachel
