Modern man has a big problem - we don’t know how to eat. Adults do not have enough time to eat normally at a calm pace, and in most cases children are not even taught to chew. Many parents specifically feed their babies soft or pureed food. Everyone is afraid that the child will be capricious or choke. Let's figure it out - what is the mistake of this approach and why is chewing so important?
Typically, people literally swallow their food and quickly wash it down with a hot or sweet liquid, and that's the end of the meal. Among the consequences: digestive problems and regular overeating, since the body requires much more energy to digest poorly chewed food.
The process of digesting food begins in the oral cavity. Saliva is secreted in the mouth, which contains enzymes and breaks down easily soluble substances and softens denser ones. The teeth and tongue grind and crush food. By the time the food gets into the stomach, it will be much easier to digest and assimilate it than if you simply swallow the product (otherwise it will ferment, which will negatively affect the functioning of the gastrointestinal tract).
As shown by Chinese and American studies published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, experiment participants consumed 11.9% fewer calories, regardless of their size, their bodies became full faster, they felt less hungry, and they even managed to lose a little weight.
Not united by food
Chewing not only ensures a normal digestive process, but also has a number of other benefits. If you start teaching your baby to chew in time (from 6-7 months), his bite will form. Moreover, as shown by a Belgian study published in the journal J Voice, chewing promotes proper speech development. When a child chews, bites or licks, his lips, tongue, cheeks and jaws work. This develops the same motor skills as when speaking. In practice, it turns out that the process of eating food is the most enjoyable type of articulatory gymnastics.
Pediatrician of the highest category Yulia Viktorovna Andronnikova told us about other functions of chewing:
- Chewing slowly allows you to feel full with less food, as the signal has time to reach the centers regulating hunger and appetite.
- Chewing movements activate areas of the cerebral cortex that are responsible for cognitive abilities. In children, chewing stimulates development. If this process is disrupted, dementia can progress in old age.
- Chewing movements form the facial skeleton, which is very important for proper breathing and blood supply to the central nervous system.
- Not a single cosmetic procedure will help keep you in good shape and improve blood supply to the facial muscles as well as proper (slow) chewing.
All sleep!
They say that the author of this diet belongs to Elvis Presley .
The principle of losing weight is simple: in order to eat less, you need to sleep more, because a person cannot eat while sleeping! To achieve this, the singer took a huge dose of sleeping pills in the evening and simply slept through dinner. Alas, the method turned out to be not very effective. Before his death, the King of Pop weighed more than one hundred kilograms with a height of 178 cm. Related article Keep the pace. At what speed should you lose weight?
However, there is still some common sense in this method of fighting hunger. The fact is that lack of sleep can actually provoke the appearance of excess weight. During sleep, our body produces a special hormone leptin, which suppresses appetite, and with lack of sleep, the concentration of another substance in the blood increases - grenlin, the so-called hunger hormone. Therefore, those who want to lose weight should make sure that their sleep is complete.
When and how to teach a child
To prepare your child for chewing, you can make faces, grimace, and perform chewing movements. When your baby “speaks baby,” answer him. The child will repeat after you and actively move his jaws, tongue and lips.
The sooner parents introduce their child to foods of different hardness, the more willing he will be to try new foods. As soon as the child began to make chewing movements, slurping and smacking, he developed an interest in food, and especially when the first teeth appear, you can give pieces of food (soft boiled vegetables, for example, carrots). The optimal age for the first introduction to food is 6-7 months. Children are old enough to accept new food, but still too young to start being capricious and indignant at the table.
What to do if your child cannot eat solids
In some cases, even a one-year-old baby cannot chew food and constantly choke on small pieces. This means that the chewing reflex has not fully formed, and parents will have to act very delicately:
- Prepare thick cream soups and purees for your child, but leave a few tiny boiled pieces of vegetables when blending
- Later, the vegetables can be chopped with a fork; the pieces will become larger, but not hard enough for a child to choke on.
- The best effect will be achieved by products whose taste the child likes. These can be baked apples and pears, bananas, children's cookies
- Food needs to be made not only tasty, but also beautiful so that it attracts the baby
If, during the learning process, the child continues to choke and is unable to swallow solid food, this is a reason to consult a doctor who will find the cause of the problem.
Underwater rocks
Up to six months, children have an active expulsion reflex - a natural defense against suffocation. Therefore, at the beginning of “communication” with semi-solid food, the child may choke and spit out the food. There is no need to be scared and abruptly return to purees and ground products! Chewing is a skill and needs to be learned.
If you've introduced semi-solid foods a long time ago and your baby is still choking, give him time. Place food in front of your baby and watch - let him try to put food in his mouth with his hand on his own. Children should be praised and not scolded at the table! Otherwise, food may begin to be associated with violence and lead to an eating disorder.
Links:
- The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Volume 94, Issue 3, September 2011, Pages 709–716, https://doi.org/10.3945/ajcn.111.015164
- The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Mastication of almonds: effects of lipid bioaccessibility, appetite, andhormone response. Bridget A Cassady. https://ucce.ucdavis.edu/files/datastore/608-11.pdf
- Cell. Nicolas Dutzan. Published: January 10, 2021 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.immuni.2016.12.010
- Effectiveness of Chewing Technique on the Phonation of Female Speech-Language Pathology Students: A Pilot Study. Meerschman I DOI:10.1016/j.jvoice.2015.06.016
Chew but don't swallow
American Horace Fletcher
The insurance company refused to sell a medical policy because the client was extremely overweight. Then Fletcher invented a very original way to lose weight. He chewed every piece of food thoroughly, but did not swallow, but spat it out. The result was not long in coming. The great chewer (as Fletcher was nicknamed) became almost 30 kg lighter.
Despite the fact that this method of losing weight is unaesthetic and harmful to the stomach, thoroughly chewing food can still help get rid of extra pounds. If you chew each piece for at least 30 seconds, the food begins to seem tasteless and your appetite disappears, scientists from the USA came to this conclusion after a series of experiments.
Who hasn't heard of this? Everyone, of course, knows that you need to chew your food thoroughly. While you are chewing, place your hands with utensils next to the plate (slightly above the edges of the plate)... This is what you have to do at a dinner party, but at home, at work, it’s what you have to do. I also eat quickly. The habit of always being in a hurry somewhere. I chew quickly, but I chew, I don’t swallow, it could be slower.
Yesterday I watched two ladies who are in the process of losing weight, losing weight with the help of psychotherapists who determined for them what to eat and when to eat. There are a lot of restrictions. One lost about 10-12 kg in a year, the second was at the beginning of her journey, but in a week she said she lost 3 kg.
Of course, they are losing weight, BUT... So I watched them eat: They took out their rations and began to quickly, quickly sort through their forks, while taking full part in the conversation with those who were simply drinking tea and coffee. The girls simply swept away everything they brought, I asked if they were full? No, but it’s no longer possible, they answered. Do you want to? Still, they answered. Then WILLPOWER came into play and they ate nothing else.
There is no point in arguing about who eats and how, but we can talk about the fact that weight loss occurs with the help of WILLPOWER and THINKING. What happens: while losing weight, we don’t teach ourselves how to NUTRITION THE BODY CORRECTLY. We don’t teach how to WORK THE DIGESTIVE SYSTEM, we don’t get pleasure from food, and we make our psyche even more angry. But it’s all so simple, CHEW SLOWLY and you will need many times less food and there are no prohibitions and you get pleasure...
Here I can envy my husband. He takes a long time to get ready, choose a fork, a knife (now we live together, we eat together, and he always eats with a knife, I can do it with one fork), then he begins to spread it on the bread, does everything slowly with pleasure, and I have already eaten the salad, I begin There is a dish, I ask him something, but he eats slowly and will never answer if he has food in his mouth. When he eats, he is deaf and dumb. This is a character that has been brought up since childhood. And I, having been on diets many times in my life, only recently realized that it’s not about them, but about WHAT I EAT AND HOW I CHEW. I knew about this, but didn’t attach any importance.
For 3 months I have been trying to eat CORRECTLY WITHOUT DIETS, I eat the norm, there are no prohibitions, I try to buy quality products. Now I try to chew slowly, but it doesn’t always work, I speed up while eating. It’s a bad habit, I’m always in a hurry to get somewhere. Normalization is proceeding very slowly, i.e. I’m not size 46 yet, I’m still more comfortable at 48, but it’s not scary. There is still time before summer to bring yourself to 46. But it’s more harmonious for me to be size 48 and teach myself to EAT CORRECTLY than to be at 46 dangling and with a hungry gleam in my eyes. I went to CHEW SLOWLY the salad and cutlet. This is my dinner. 2 hours before bedtime there will be kefir.
Anorexia remains the scourge of the capital's youth
One of the victims of anorexia.
For several years now, there has been a community on the World Wide Web designed to help girls suffering from anorexia, a mental illness based on a pathological desire to lose weight and accompanied by a fear of obesity. At first, those who could no longer lose weight actually turned to the site for support. But gradually the picture changed, and the page began to be replete with entries from like-minded women dreaming of an emaciated body.
Now the site, which has almost one and a half thousand readers, resembles a perverted society of Alcoholics Anonymous, where participants do not help each other lead a sober lifestyle, but advise how to get drunk without your wife noticing. “I’m a fat freak,” the young ladies complain and post photos where they are three times thinner than Scarlett Johansson. Products with instructions “these are Poles!” and “Well, you’ve let yourself down, friend,” they throw in comments with advice - what medicine is better to give an enema with and how to last a week on water alone.
“The “two fingers in the mouth” method has completely stopped helping,” 19-year-old Anya addresses the public. “It worked for five years, but now it doesn’t work.” What to do?
The answers do not take long to arrive. “My fingers don’t help me either, even if I swallow my whole hand, I stick the tablespoon deeper.” “Try drinking a glass of sunflower oil, I always take a small bottle with me when I go on a visit.” The main thing is that no one around you catches you hugging the toilet, otherwise explanations cannot be avoided. Many people have been on a “vomit” diet since they were 12-14 years old. At first glance, the method is truly effective - in the end, nothing edible gets into the body. Just a few of these regular urges - and you will feel sick automatically, after every meal. This will certainly affect your weight, but no one has ever managed to survive by completely giving up food. It is extremely difficult to recover from the habit of putting two fingers in your mouth after every meal. Most likely you will have to go to the hospital.
The “vomit” diet also has a bad effect on the appearance, which adherents care so much about. “For eight years I was doing something where after eating I would immediately run to the toilet and put two fingers in my mouth. Now I haven’t been practicing this for five months, but the enamel on my teeth is still in terrible condition, and I need to go to the dentist. What if he guesses?” Indeed, during nausea, gastric juice is released, which is converted into acid, which completely erases the enamel. If you do this constantly, the oral cavity will resemble ruins. What man would risk kissing someone like that?
The consequences can even be tragic - remember the famous fashion model Ana Carolina Reston, who died of exhaustion four years ago. Her death prompted connoisseurs in the fashion world to reconsider their views on “thin” beauty. However, some people get rid of food in a different way: “If I want to feel the taste of food, I take the food, chew and spit it out,” writes a high school student, “lately I’ve been sitting right in front of the toilet, chewing and spitting it out. It helps a lot - you can feel the taste of food and you don’t gain weight. The weight makes me happy - 43.6 kg, which is what I weighed in the third grade.”
The “star” of the website is Oksana Dolgova (name changed), a student at the prestigious faculty of Moscow’s largest university. Two and a half years ago, the girl “burst” into the anorexic society with the statement that she wanted to be like Paris Hilton and therefore intended to lose weight to 35 kg. By the way, with a height of 171 cm, the Muscovite weighed 56 kg. Calling on her friends on the Internet for support, Oksana went on a strict diet, after each stage of which she posted pictures of her body for the audience to judge. “Did you lose weight on purpose or are you naturally like this?” - the admiring comrades-in-arms threw in another batch of photos. “What would I do in this community if I was naturally like this?” - Oksana retorted and continued to starve. After a couple of months, among the comments under photographs of an increasingly thin body, “I think you don’t need to lose weight anymore” and “maybe it’s time to stop?” began to appear. Her dream came true - she lost weight to 35 kg. I could eat one apple and a tomato a day. This was in March 2008, after which Oksana admitted that she felt terrible and dreamed of gaining at least 40 kg, but it was not possible. Now, two years later, Oksana is still being treated for anorexia in the hospital. And the most annoying thing is that, having reached the cherished number on the scales, the girl discovered that in our boutiques they simply do not sell clothes for such thin beauty.
Let yourself dry
In general, all kinds of celebrations: weddings, birthdays, fashionable parties - often become an X-day for girls who consider themselves fat. By the appointed date, young ladies strive to “lose weight” by any means! Another method that is very popular in the online community is to drink a diuretic. In practice, the medicine really helps you look slimmer. “Girls, help, I would like to be visually dry by Wednesday,” writes the young creature. “If you are ready to run to the toilet for six hours, take a diuretic. It will remove water from tissues and vessels - and your volume will decrease,” the friends answer. True, there are also those who had to forget about the festive event because they got up in the morning with swollen faces and legs. And if you get hooked - this is a one-time event for few people - then you can forget about healthy kidneys.
There are countless pitfalls in the methods described above. Frequent use of diuretics also causes cramps in various parts of the body. If you don’t eat for several days, and then eat and “vomit,” then a rupture of the esophageal mucosa may occur, as happened in one of the community members. Regular vomiting in women causes the capillaries in the eyes to burst and the whites to become completely red. It returns to normal white color only after a couple of weeks. Due to their unpresentable appearance, ladies are sent on forced leave from work, but they do not give up the idea of losing weight.
Weight confused
Despite the fact that the girls really believe that 35 kg of bones is indescribable beauty, it is difficult to explain this to the people around them. We have to come up with all sorts of ways to avoid detection.
“I understand that it’s not becoming for an adult to ask such stupid questions, but still, where should we attach the lead weights so that they don’t get burned during weighing? — asks a completely self-sufficient woman. - I have a very hysterical mother. She always tries to weigh me. And now I’m 2 kg lighter than the weight I promised her to stay at... How can I make myself heavier?” “I take a bra with foam cups, rip it open and insert a twisted metal wire - it adds one and a half to two kilograms of weight. I sew everything up as it was. No one has ever noticed! It weighs 3 kilos,” “You drink two liters of water before the procedure, and one and a half kg is added on the scale,” sympathizers immediately respond.
The hardest thing for people with anorexia is admitting it to their parents and friends. Which, by the way, have been telling girls for a long time that “there is no need to lose weight anymore.” However, the lamentations of relatives rarely lead to success.
The most dangerous thing is that from time to time messages appear in the feed like “I came to your site for the first time and realized how wrong I was for not watching my figure. Now I am in your ranks. Hello anorexics! The first goal is 40 kg! Then I’ll move on.” How many girls who accidentally visited this page and studied the entries and photos began to look at themselves with different eyes and went on a hunger strike! If a regular visitor stops writing, this means only one thing - either she has been cured of weight loss mania, or she has gone to the hospital, where others are trying to cure her. Fortunately, not everyone has access to read records. However, to be among the favorites, you just need to send a request to a moderator, who will approve it within a day or so.
Anorexia remains the scourge of the capital's youth
One of the victims of anorexia.
For several years now, there has been a community on the World Wide Web designed to help girls suffering from anorexia, a mental illness based on a pathological desire to lose weight and accompanied by a fear of obesity. At first, those who could no longer lose weight actually turned to the site for support. But gradually the picture changed, and the page began to be replete with entries from like-minded women dreaming of an emaciated body.
Now the site, which has almost one and a half thousand readers, resembles a perverted society of Alcoholics Anonymous, where participants do not help each other lead a sober lifestyle, but advise how to get drunk without your wife noticing. “I’m a fat freak,” the young ladies complain and post photos where they are three times thinner than Scarlett Johansson. Products with instructions “these are Poles!” and “Well, you’ve let yourself down, friend,” they throw in comments with advice - what medicine is better to give an enema with and how to last a week on water alone.
“The “two fingers in the mouth” method has completely stopped helping,” 19-year-old Anya addresses the public. “It worked for five years, but now it doesn’t work.” What to do?
The answers do not take long to arrive. “My fingers don’t help me either, even if I swallow my whole hand, I stick the tablespoon deeper.” “Try drinking a glass of sunflower oil, I always take a small bottle with me when I go on a visit.” The main thing is that no one around you catches you hugging the toilet, otherwise explanations cannot be avoided. Many people have been on a “vomit” diet since they were 12-14 years old. At first glance, the method is truly effective - in the end, nothing edible gets into the body. Just a few of these regular urges - and you will feel sick automatically, after every meal. This will certainly affect your weight, but no one has ever managed to survive by completely giving up food. It is extremely difficult to recover from the habit of putting two fingers in your mouth after every meal. Most likely you will have to go to the hospital.
The “vomit” diet also has a bad effect on the appearance, which adherents care so much about. “For eight years I was doing something where after eating I would immediately run to the toilet and put two fingers in my mouth. Now I haven’t been practicing this for five months, but the enamel on my teeth is still in terrible condition, and I need to go to the dentist. What if he guesses?” Indeed, during nausea, gastric juice is released, which is converted into acid, which completely erases the enamel. If you do this constantly, the oral cavity will resemble ruins. What man would risk kissing someone like that?
The consequences can even be tragic - remember the famous fashion model Ana Carolina Reston, who died of exhaustion four years ago. Her death prompted connoisseurs in the fashion world to reconsider their views on “thin” beauty. However, some people get rid of food in a different way: “If I want to feel the taste of food, I take the food, chew and spit it out,” writes a high school student, “lately I’ve been sitting right in front of the toilet, chewing and spitting it out. It helps a lot - you can feel the taste of food and you don’t gain weight. The weight makes me happy - 43.6 kg, which is what I weighed in the third grade.”
The “star” of the website is Oksana Dolgova (name changed), a student at the prestigious faculty of Moscow’s largest university. Two and a half years ago, the girl “burst” into the anorexic society with the statement that she wanted to be like Paris Hilton and therefore intended to lose weight to 35 kg. By the way, with a height of 171 cm, the Muscovite weighed 56 kg. Calling on her friends on the Internet for support, Oksana went on a strict diet, after each stage of which she posted pictures of her body for the audience to judge. “Did you lose weight on purpose or are you naturally like this?” - the admiring comrades-in-arms threw in another batch of photos. “What would I do in this community if I was naturally like this?” - Oksana retorted and continued to starve. After a couple of months, among the comments under photographs of an increasingly thin body, “I think you don’t need to lose weight anymore” and “maybe it’s time to stop?” began to appear. Her dream came true - she lost weight to 35 kg. I could eat one apple and a tomato a day. This was in March 2008, after which Oksana admitted that she felt terrible and dreamed of gaining at least 40 kg, but it was not possible. Now, two years later, Oksana is still being treated for anorexia in the hospital. And the most annoying thing is that, having reached the cherished number on the scales, the girl discovered that in our boutiques they simply do not sell clothes for such thin beauty.
Let yourself dry
In general, all kinds of celebrations: weddings, birthdays, fashionable parties - often become an X-day for girls who consider themselves fat. By the appointed date, young ladies strive to “lose weight” by any means! Another method that is very popular in the online community is to drink a diuretic. In practice, the medicine really helps you look slimmer. “Girls, help, I would like to be visually dry by Wednesday,” writes the young creature. “If you are ready to run to the toilet for six hours, take a diuretic. It will remove water from tissues and vessels - and your volume will decrease,” the friends answer. True, there are also those who had to forget about the festive event because they got up in the morning with swollen faces and legs. And if you get hooked - this is a one-time event for few people - then you can forget about healthy kidneys.
There are countless pitfalls in the methods described above. Frequent use of diuretics also causes cramps in various parts of the body. If you don’t eat for several days, and then eat and “vomit,” then a rupture of the esophageal mucosa may occur, as happened in one of the community members. Regular vomiting in women causes the capillaries in the eyes to burst and the whites to become completely red. It returns to normal white color only after a couple of weeks. Due to their unpresentable appearance, ladies are sent on forced leave from work, but they do not give up the idea of losing weight.
Weight confused
Despite the fact that the girls really believe that 35 kg of bones is indescribable beauty, it is difficult to explain this to the people around them. We have to come up with all sorts of ways to avoid detection.
“I understand that it’s not becoming for an adult to ask such stupid questions, but still, where should we attach the lead weights so that they don’t get burned during weighing? — asks a completely self-sufficient woman. - I have a very hysterical mother. She always tries to weigh me. And now I’m 2 kg lighter than the weight I promised her to stay at... How can I make myself heavier?” “I take a bra with foam cups, rip it open and insert a twisted metal wire - it adds one and a half to two kilograms of weight. I sew everything up as it was. No one has ever noticed! It weighs 3 kilos,” “You drink two liters of water before the procedure, and one and a half kg is added on the scale,” sympathizers immediately respond.
The hardest thing for people with anorexia is admitting it to their parents and friends. Which, by the way, have been telling girls for a long time that “there is no need to lose weight anymore.” However, the lamentations of relatives rarely lead to success.
The most dangerous thing is that from time to time messages appear in the feed like “I came to your site for the first time and realized how wrong I was for not watching my figure. Now I am in your ranks. Hello anorexics! The first goal is 40 kg! Then I’ll move on.” How many girls who accidentally visited this page and studied the entries and photos began to look at themselves with different eyes and went on a hunger strike! If a regular visitor stops writing, this means only one thing - either she has been cured of weight loss mania, or she has gone to the hospital, where others are trying to cure her. Fortunately, not everyone has access to read records. However, to be among the favorites, you just need to send a request to a moderator, who will approve it within a day or so.
It is believed that William the Conqueror began a wine diet in the 11th century after he was unable to climb onto a horse on his own due to his huge belly. The essence of the royal method is quite simple - excess fat needs to be washed out of the body, and since water is common people's food, it should be washed out with wine. It was the same diet that killed Wilhelm. During the war with Normandy, in which the tipsy king decided to personally take part, the monarch's horse fell and William himself died.
The alcoholic diet is still popular among young people today. Boys and girls replace full lunches and dinners with cocktails in bars. Excess weight does go away, but such a diet has a detrimental effect on your health.
