7 Tips for Better Digestive Health

1. Do not drink liquids just before, during or just after your meal — especially not cold ones.
This can dilute your digestive enzymes (conflicting research on this) and weakens digestive fire. If you do drink, a cup of warm tea or water is usually okay, and will likely not affect enzyme activity. Meals high in salt are doubly injurious because they promote imbalance of excessive thirst and water intake. Pay attention; notice what works.

2. Talk minimally while eating, if at all, and chew your food really well.
Talking impairs chewing, allows excess air into digestive tract, and often creates tension, which hampers good digestion. Excessive talking while eating distracts one from body-awareness and leads easily to over-eating. On the other hand, if you are upset/stressed and you have to eat, talking might help you alleviate your upset, in which case it is beneficial. This highlights the importance of listening to your body for what feels good.

3. Eat soup
This is the original, post-harnessing of fire era, most efficient and nutritious way to consume food. It allows for maximum nutrient absorption, and when prepared with herbs, especially Chinese herbs, the benefits are increased. Make a pot every few days; warm it up as needed. Soup is efficient, nutritious, fun, cost effective, and easy to digest. If you eat meat, it is most easily digested in soup.

4. Try squatting while you eat
The rest of the world does it for good reason, not just for the absence of chairs. Squatting is helpful especially if you have been sitting or doing sedentary, intellectual work, where energy stagnates in the upper body (e.g., computer work). Squatting stimulates digestion by encouraging energy to flow downward, helping to relax breathing and the diaphragm, as well as activating the “middle and lower burners,” the areas of the torso corresponding with digestion.

5. Eat fruit and drink water between meals.
Wait at least 10 minutes before eating if you have to drink more than a cup or so of water, and 15 minutes after eating fruit. Especially if you have compromised digestive health, I have found that bloating, indigestion, and gas develop when this is not heeded. Wait at least an hour after eating before eating fruit, and half an hour or so for drinking water is also optimal. This is both cleansing for your system and does not dilute your digestive enzymes for digesting solid food.

6. Do not eat when stressed or emotionally upset.
This is common sense, really, but often ignored. Intuitively, it does not feel good or right to eat when stressed out. In Chinese medicine, stress and emotional angst primarily impact the Liver organ network, which in turn “invades” the Spleen/Stomach system. The Liver organ network is crucial for good digestion and assimilation.
Unless you are “starving,” try to unwind before eating. Take a walk, do some deep breathing, process your feelings, take some deep breaths and eat while keeping your stomach and belly area relaxed. A “quick check” method for this is to gauge the softness of your lower belly. Breathing in it should pooch it out slightly, and exhaling, your belly should recede. Also try to avoid physical and emotional stress after eating.

7. Resolve past and present emotional issues and traumas.
Obsession with ultra-pure diets often carries an element of transference of unconscious emotional issues so that we feel chronically “toxic.” We mistakenly think we can clear emotional wounds and vacancies through diet. Because mind and body are intimately linked, a better diet and eating habits can help us achieve emotional integration/balance on one level, but will not address deeper emotional roots of food obsessions. Such obsessions create fanaticism, rigidity, neurotic worry, and leave us unresolved and unintegrated.