Although you may be menu planning and meal tracking, your nutrition might not be enough. The one component that many miss when looking at your daily intake of food is timing. Nutrient timing is vital! The reason to that is, that even thought our bodies are incredible machines, they too need time to process – DIGEST!
Down below I am offering you some information for you to keep in mind when you are planning out your meals. It reminds me of when I was a kid and almost everyone’s parent would say “be sure to wait 30 minutes after you eat before you can go swim!” … lol kinda kills the pool party if you know what I mean.
Time To Digest Foods:
So Now What?
The point of all this information is that in reality, we don’t typically consume just one of these food groups at a time. So when cooking a meal, for example: steak, potatoes, and salad, you need to consider all the time needed to fully digest the entire meal. In this case, it would be approximately 7-8 hours.
If you don’t allow your body enough time to properly digest, a few things happen:
- Some people may feel bloated or “stuffed” which results in your body not breaking down the nutrients properly.
- This causes the body to not keep the good and not get rid of the bad, it will simply just store it, ie: FAT accumulates.
Now, don’t get me wrong I am NOT saying don’t eat steak and potatoes, I am just saying be sure to not eat right afterwards and to drink lots of liquids so your body can properly break it down!
Make sure to check out my previous blog posts for more nutrition tips!
Happy Planning
Sincerely, Shanon