What is Fletcherism? Will it Help you Lose Weight?
When I was at school – boarding school – we tried all sorts of different ways to eat. Probably because we were hungry and could drag out the eating. One of the games we played was fletcherism. Someone had heard about this way of eating was a really healthy way to eat!
So what exactly is fletcherism? According to Wallace Wattles, who wrote about it about 100 years ago, it “consists in tasting and chewing every mouthful of food until it is reduced to a liquid, so that it gets away from you by involuntary swallowing”. The reason for doing this is to assist in the digestion process. Instead of wolfing down your food you chew it 20 to 30 times or more until it becomes a liquid in your mouth and mixed well with saliva. The process of digestion begins in the mouth, with saliva mixing with and beginning to break down the food before it gets to the stomach.
Using fletcherism as a method by which to eat has two advantages. It helps with digestion but it also helps with weight loss. And why would this be. Well, you are generally only hungry for about 20 minutes, so if you are eating slowly by using the fletcherism method you will not consume as much food in the twenty minutes that you are hungry. A simple healthy way to lose weight. You dont really have to change what you are eating for this method to have an effect as long as you stop eating when the hunger feeling passes and you feel content. Even though you have left some of your meal on your plate, lol!
This method is easier to implement when you eat unrefined food because these foods, naturally,because of the fibre in them, need more chewing. White bread and cakes made from refined flour and sugar sort of slide down without any chewing and you have to force yourself to keep chewing, counting the chews when you eat this sort of food. Yuk! But it can be done!
If you put down your knife and fork between mouthfuls you will find that you slow down your speed of eating. It works similarly to fletcherism as you are forced to eat slower.
Both methods need practice and can be done together. But it takes changing your lifetime habit of the way you eat to a new one. Strangly enough you will find that you are not over eating and leave the table feeling content and not bloated. By aiding your digestive system with saliva it will function better. Not to forget the fact that you may lose some of those extra kilos.
