Hello friends.
I hope you all are having a fabulous week so far! I had another workshop in Nashville for my PMA certification. It was fun and exhausting as always! It was all about the Wunda Chair, which was interesting since I hardly ever use it. We have one at THE STUDIO, so it will be nice to play on it this week.
I am reading a really interesting book right now called The Blue Zone Solution, which describes the lifestyles and eating habits in certain parts of the world where people are living up to a decade longer than we are in the United States (with the exceptions of Loma Linda, Calif.) I will get more in depth about it in a later post, but I did want to touch on one topic from the book today, and that is a little something called Hara Hachi Bu.
Say what?
I had never heard of such a thing until reading this book, and then I realized I had been living by this principle for a while now and didn’t even know it.
It’s a Confucian teaching that instructs people to eat until they are 80 percent full. The Okinawans in Japan (one of the Blue Zones) practice this, thus their typical BMI is around 18 to 22, compared to an average 26 or 27 for Americans over 60. That’s a huge difference!
Most Americans are so used to overeating, and as a result, if they don’t FEEL full they assume they need to eat more. That’s just not the case.
I truly believe that if more Americans adopted just this one practice, our obesity rate would drop dramatically.
This is not the sort of thing that just happens overnight. You have to slow down and be mindful when you eat. Do you feel satisfied, but not totally stuffed? If you stopped eating right then, how would you feel in two hours? Something that will help with this is to just not eat everything on your plate, or use a smaller plate.
What about you? Do you eat until you are totally stuffed, or do you try to reign it in before you get to that point?
