Enjoy food and maintain a healthy weight.
Dieting, which causes excessive loss of weight and the feeding-up of an emaciated person, is beset with difficulties. — Hippocrates. Not gonna talk about the ancient Greeks, but rather how you can lose weight, the Japanese way.
Well-done studies of diet and chronic diseases have improved our understanding of the relationship between diet and the development of various diseases. While dietary guidelines vary globally, they are often quite similar in terms of emphasizing certain foods and nutrients.
Stop eating when you’re 80 percent full
Today, I do not want to focus on what represents the ideal diet. Instead, I want to introduce you to an interesting Japanese concept known as hara hachi bun me (腹八分目). Derived from Confucian teaching, it instructs people to eat until they are 80 percent full. Translated into English, we get “eat until you are eight parts (out of ten) full.”
Okinawans in Japan continue to engage in hara hachi bun me. The typical elder has a body mass index of between 18 and 22. This BMI is in marked contrast to the American typical body mass index of 26 or 27 for adults over 60.
Okinawa is a so-called blue zones region where people live extraordinarily long and healthy lives. Could there be a connection between the relative lack of obesity in Okinawa and the fact that they have the world’s highest proportion of centenarians? Calorie restriction is associated with the prolongation of life in animals.
Here’s how hara hachi bun me may work its magic: The practice might affect stomach stretch receptors that affect the sense of feeling full or satiety. There is more constant stretching of the stomach for those who do not practice the 80 percent approach. The extension of the organ, in turn, requires a continuous extension of the organ to feel full.
In their book The Okinawa Program: How the World’s Longest-Lived People Achieve Everlasting Health — And How You Can Too, authorsWillcox, Willcox, and Suzuki assert: “If Americans lived more like the Okinawans, 80 percent of the nation’s coronary care units, one-third of the cancer wards, and we could shut down a lot of the nursing homes.”
Try hara hachi bun me
How to lose weight: You may wish to consider hara hachi bun me as a form of calorie restriction. Go here to learn some practical suggestions:
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