“Eating” is inseparable from “living”. It is best to do it without anxiety, because the mechanism of digestion is very influenced by stress, while imperatively maintaining the notion of pleasure.
- Pleasure and conviviality: eating is inseparable from living, and it is crucial to maintain the notion of pleasure and conviviality around the table for stress-free digestion.
- Impact of stress on digestion: The mechanism of digestion is strongly influenced by stress, so eating in a peaceful and pleasant environment improves digestion and well-being.
- Quality of meal time: The quality of time spent eating is more important than the quantity of time; it is essential to focus on the meal and be fully present, without distractions, to appreciate the sensations and flavors.
Since man has been eating his fill, he has sat down to share a moment of pleasure, with family or friends. We should rather write “se mettait”, as eating has become a real source of distressing questions. It took a century to go from joy to fear of consuming products that are dangerous for health, and above all, of gaining too much weight. It is the notion of “pleasure of the table” which induces that of conviviality.
Eat without anxiety to digest well
“Eating” is inseparable from “living”. So it’s best to do it without anxiety, because the digestive mechanism is greatly influenced by stress. Everyone has noticed that a peaceful meal, with someone you like, goes down much better than eating “expressly”, with an “acid” character at your side.
Whatever the problems posed by food, and to avoid the terrible problems posed by, for example, anorexia, we must campaign for a simple idea: eating is good! This is also summed up in a scientific term that is not very well known, but which deserves to be mentioned: organoleptic, which means that a product can be appreciated globally by the human senses (touch, taste, smell).
Rabelais, through his Gargantua, was the first to teach that “eating could be passionate”. Some people, when weighing themselves in the morning, must not have such an idyllic vision of the situation.
This is probably what sociologists call the “nutritional cacophony.”
Eating is introducing something into oneself: it is therefore an “intimate” relationship which, like all these intimate behaviors, also obeys a biological determinism – the monoamines of our brain – and social aspects: we eat, as others eat, in your country, in your culture, in your civilization. So, we are used to these intimate behaviors, in which many non-intimate factors intervene.
It is the possibility of acting on one’s body and shaping it: so getting fat, getting thin, is it a way of taking control of it? It is a way of reappropriating one’s body. For an anorexic, losing weight means going to the limits of fasting and the limits of the body.
Take the time to focus on what you eat
New lifestyles incompatible with academically healthy eating for doctors. Meal time has decreased, the meal no longer becomes the pivot of the day.
Psychiatrists are less interested in the quantity of time than in the quality of time. We can always be nostalgic for the large tables that lasted for hours or for these very ritualized and very long meals, but what we call concentration on the moment is the most important. That is to say that when we eat, we must pay attention to what we are doing. For example, we are not going to, at the same time, tap on our cell phone, answer our messages… Today, in an era that is becoming a little difficult, with this pressure on time, one of the ways to get through it is to really sequence our time, and when eating, be totally available, conscious, awake, of the sensations that the meal will trigger.
Based on an interview with Professor Michel Lejoyeux, professor of psychiatry at Bichat Hospital (Paris).
