Do you eat based on how you feel or based on your needs?
Connecting your eating habits with your body’s needs is important. This can be learned.
When we were babies, we cry when we are hungry and turn away when we are full. Babies know exactly what they want and when they want it. As we grow older, we allow the noise from our external environment to distract us and, we stop listening to our innate needs.
What if we learn to pause and pay attention to our needs?
Our gut has 500 million neurons that talk directly to the brain via the gut-brain axis. You can call this the superhighway between the gut and brain. On this highway, the exchange of information about our hunger, appetite, and digestion happens.
Remember our friend the vagus nerve? The vagus nerve assists the sending of signals back and forth in the gut-brain axis.
The gut is also called our second brain because it has a mesh-like system of nerve cells like the neurons in our brain. In the gut, it’s called the enteric nervous system (ENS). The ENS gathers information from the gut microbes as they break down the food we eat, send messages to our brain, and influence our reality.
When was the last time you said, “I feel sick to my gut” or “My gut feel tells me…” Our ‘gut feel’ is more real than we think. In fact, 90% of our happy hormones (serotonin) are made in our gut.