While it’s snowing in Canada, we are enjoying this gorgeous spring time here in South. It’s so good to see people meeting up again, the cricket game breaking friendships as always and dogs running wild, chasing the ball and pebbles in and out of the water. Now what got me excited this morning were tomatoes advertised on one of our farm shop’s instagram post. Preparing all the meals in my head involving the delicious red juicy vegetable (or fruit, botanically speaking?), I arrived to a sad discovery of all of them being sold out. That’s what I get for staying in bed until noon  while the early birds got the worm. No regrets tho, I love my bed on Sundays.

Now we all know we have to eat. Some eat simply to survive, some struggle with eating, others love eating to silence their issues for a few minutes and some get excited about nourishing their bodies with variety of different healthy foods every single day. Everyone has their own relationship with it and I hope one day we all figure out the concept that food is not the enemy or an annoying habit we have to attend to a few times a day.

Once we get to the understanding that food is there to aim to our body’s healthy function, there are many ways to increase the digestion and absorption of the good stuff.

One of the ways to help our body digest the food we eat better, is to slow down and not give into distractions like laptops, phones, chores and netflix whilst consuming/chewing the food. All the named side hustles increase the stress response in the body, meaning, less priority is given to a full attention to digestion, as some of it gets used to deal with some level of fight or flight response-sympathetic nervous system overdrive.

The appearance and atmosphere of the meal is also important. Anything that gets your saliva going and preparing your digestive juices even before you have put anything in your mouth, will assure your food is digested better. Associating good feelings with eating is a game changer! You are more likely to absorb and digest all the good nutritional bits from the food you LOVE putting inside of your body instead of food you are FORCED to eat. Imagine a child crying over a parent’s try on feeding them raw green veggies versus a nicely arranged dinosaur shaped chicken pieces with veggies cooked into their favourite brownie pieces? Guess which one will more likely to disappear quicker and get that satisfaction rate higher?

So I hope all of you take my little Sunday thinking for a food of thought and enjoy your dinner more today. Get those candle lights on, get a beautiful assortment on your plate and put a cheeky Michael Buble in the background.