Cate Stillman's book Body Thrive Chapter 8

This is part 1 of 3 from Chapter 12 of Cate Stillman's book "Body Thrive" that you can purchase from her website here. We are excited to collaborate with her to get the word out about healthy living! Also, check out the interview between Cate and HANAH founder Joel Einhorn on the YogaHealer podcast.

Healthy Eating Guidelines

What to do

Eat only two to three meals per day, without snacking. You'll burn fat between meals and be hungry to thoroughly enjoy them. Reconnect with the chicken-scratching sensation in your stomach, signifying readiness to eat, and you will provoke a deeper, fat-burning metabolism. Empower your digestion to work undisturbed by taking only water between meals.

Why it's important

Nourishment is as much about when you eat and how you eat as it is about what you eat. When you eat only a few times a day, you burn fat—a steady energy source—between meals. This habit of honoring emptiness and fullness, rest and digestion, and hunger and satiation attunes us to the law of pulsation for maximum energy.

Digestion requires energy. When you eat emotionally, or too frequently, you tax your digestion, rendering less energy available for everything else you want to do. Tax digestion repeatedly and a residue of poorly digested food builds up in your GI tract. The buildup is grime in your physical, mental and emotional gears. Uplevel your energy and cultivate deep power through improving your digestion.

How to start

Before you take a bite, take a breath. Make sure you're hungry. If you've had a meal in the last one to three hours, drink water and take a short walk instead. Chances are you're looking for a distraction or you're thirsty.

My friend Hunter, a local cabinetmaker and seasonal big game hunter, came to see me about digestive complaints. I asked him to stick out his tongue. I wanted to see and smell what was going on in his digestive tract. The tongue and breath do not lie. Through my Ayurvedic practice, I've noticed that the client's body is often more descriptive and accurate than their words.

A thick white coating of ama covered Hunter's tongue. Under the coating red dots were poking through. I asked Hunter if he ate leftovers. He proudly replied, "I make a crock of stew or something on Sundays and eat it for the week." Aha.

Uh-oh. Food starts to lose prana, life-force energy, when it is left overnight, even in the fridge. Your food should taste and feel vibrant with life force. You may have noticed that flavor fades from leftovers and they require more salt to be palatable, which is more sodium for your body to process. Your tongue is your body's gatekeeper, detecting the freshness, flavor or lack thereof. Your tongue is also the ambassador of the entire gastrointestinal tract, and as such, decides what to swallow and what to spit out.

You want your tongue to be smart, alert and ready to inform whether you should swallow or spit, ingest or eject.

Your digestive tract is a snake

Your digestive tract is like a snake, with its head being the tongue and tail being the anus. Your tongue also has a map of the whole snake which you can check on a tongue chart. Your tongue, asgi ambassador, gets to choose whether to swallow or spit.

A coated tongue makes a horrible ambassador for the deeper tissue of the body, which depends on the tongue to meet its nutritional and taste requirements. Due to poor digestion, you may have a thick coating on your tongue. You lose the sharp clarity of your taste buds, as a coated tongue can't taste accurately. A healthy tongue looks vibrant, pink, and moist, with a thin, almost clear coating. It tastes accurately. The ambassador of digestion communicates what is happening in the deeper tissue of your body. If your taste buds and guts are healthy, you'll be receptive only to healthy foods.

Stay tuned for the next portion of "Body Thrive" next week! The author Cate Stillman is the founder of Yogahealer.com. She empowers thrive-seekers to uplevel their health, careers, and lives in real time. Cate teaches wellness pros to grow their impact and income and live their best lives.

Check out the rest of the 3 part series and our other blogs with Cate:

Healthy eating guidelines from Cate Stillman (part 1 of 3)