AYURVEDA PERSPECTIVE ON LARGE PORTIONS

You've probably heard the infamous phrase "your eyes are bigger than your stomach" and for those who struggle with large portions, this often rings true. There are diverse reasons for indulging in large portions, such as emotional eating, an attempt to relieve pain in the upper GI, or even to fill a mineral or vitamin deficiency. Even an overactive thyroid gland can lead to a voracious appetite and therefore hefty amounts of food.

Large portions can be unhealthy for many reasons. An overstuffed stomach has a hard time churning your food, making it difficult to digest your meal. Large portions make you tired. It's easier for parasites to survive breakdown from enzymes when hidden in a larger meal. Large portions can lead to overspending on food. Accordingly, addressing the underlying patterns and programming that lead to large portions is important in Ayurveda.

Excessively large portions can cause stomach distension. When the quantity of food overwhelms your stomach's capacity, the food builds up pressure, ultimately forcing it's way into the duodenum, the start of your small intestine. Pre-mixed with digestive acids in the stomach, this food burns your duodenum, causing ulcers and inflammation in the upper gastric area.

How much should I eat?

The ideal portion in Ayurveda is the amount of food that fits into both hands cupped together. After eating, your stomach should contain 1/3 food, 1/3 liquid, and 1/3 air. In other words, your stomach should be 2/3's full. IF you eat quickly, you won't feel satisfied at 2/3's full. But if you wait 20 minutes, long enough for your body to start digesting the food, you'll discover you don't need to stuff yourself.

Reconnect to True Hunger

You might have grown up in a family where you were expected to eat everything on your plate, regardless of your hunger, fullness, and satiety cues. Then as an adult, you find yourself struggling to hear to your body's internal appetite cues. If you eat too quickly or while distracted, you may unconsciously heaping up large portions before your body has a chance to alert you, "Enough!".

To reconnect with your hunger cues, start by paying attention, no matter how faint these cues may seem, simply try to feel them. Try eating until your half full. Then check in with your stomach to see how it feels. Does belly hunger persist? If it doesn't, try waiting ten minutes and see how you feel.

One of the biggest appetite regulators of your body is the feeling of a full stomach. Each time you eat too much and overstretch your stomach, your stomach gets bigger and harder to fill. Your body gets used to having an abnormally high amount of food in its stomach and satiety is blurred. Your capacity to eat more increases as well, which can perpetuate the behavior. Ayurveda can help you return your stomach to a smaller size so that you can eat when you are hungry and know when you are truly full, as opposed to uncomfortably stuffed.

If you find yourself tempted to continue eating despite fullness, distract yourself: go for a walk, talk to a loved one, work on a craft. Find an activity engaging enough to get your mind off the remaining food and back on life's other pleasures.

What to do when you've eaten too much

If you do indulge in large portions on occasion, Ayurveda offers some helpful tips to avoid causing imbalance. Roasting a teaspoon of coriander seeds and a teaspoon of fennel seeds in a pot without oil and then chewing them can be effective at curbing indigestion. Another option is drinking a glass of water with the juice from half a lemon or lime and a pinch of baking soda. These practices are not a quick fix and should not be used to justify recurrent large portions, but they can help mitigate some of the imbalances caused by overeating if you slip up.

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