Sachin Patel (Living Light Metabolic Coach) presents a short instructional talk on digestion and metabolic optimization, framing why constant snacking raises metabolic activity but may impair metabolic health. He promotes giving the digestive system strategic breaks and introduces the mnemonic "Five Cs" for digestion: (1) Choose — pick foods/times consistent with your goals and favor a narrow feeding window (ideally one meal at "high noon" or two meals aligned to schedule); (2) Chew — thoroughly (target ~30–45 bites until salsa-like consistency) to mechanically break plant cell walls, mix saliva, and enable enzymatic digestion; (3) Chill — eat relaxed, seated, to favor parasympathetic digestion ("autonomic pairing"); (4) Cherish — cultivate gratitude for meals to support parasympathetic state; (5) Check — visually inspect stool for undigested food, abnormal color, blood, or strong odor and consider annual microscopic stool testing via a practitioner to screen for parasites, pathogen imbalances, or malabsorption.
Chapters
Hello, my friends. It's Sachin. Hope you're awesome. In today's video about metabolic optimization, we're going to talk about digestion. And there's five key things that I like to talk about when it comes to digestion, as we know, many people have heard before that when you eat more often, it increases your metabolism. And I'm actually here to tell you that that is true, but not true at the same time. Yes, eating more often increases your metabolism, but that's because every time you eat, you have to make stomach acid, you have to make pancreatic enzymes, you have to make bile in the liver and release it from the gallbladder. Your immune system has to interface with every molecule of food that you eat. You've got to break all that stuff down and you've got to move it through your body, through the waste system and eliminate it. So, yes, eating is going to increase your metabolism, but it's not necessarily great for your metabolic health to be constantly eating. In fact, we want to give our digestive system strategic breaks throughout the day so it could do its job much more impactfully. Just like for you, if you were working 14 hours a day versus working strategically for six to eight hours a day and be very focused and getting the job done, you'd probably be far more happy and you'd be far more productive at the same time. So there's a couple things when it comes to ensuring that you get the most out of the food that you're eating. In fact, there's five or more things in this video we're going to talk about five big ones. So with these instructions, I want you to stay present to them. I want you to not let the simplicity of what I'm going to share with you make it so that you don't take action. I want you to action. These steps and all of these tips I'm giving you are purposely designed to unlock, using simple techniques, healing mechanisms that your body has. So let's go through the five Cs of digestion. First. C is you want to choose the right foods. You want to eat foods that are consistent with who you want to become. You want to choose foods that you feel good about. Okay. And you want to also choose how you feel about what you're going to eat. You can choose to be grateful, or you can choose to be miserable and view eating healthy as a punishment. I view it with immense gratitude. And that makes a big difference. The other part of choose is you want to choose the right time of day to eat and so what we encourage is if you can at all possible, if at all possible, eat one meal a day. And if you were going to eat one meal a day, you would eat it at high noon. What is high noon? High noon is when the sickness sun is in the highest position in the sky. It's not always 12 o'. Clock. Okay? So you have to look at when high noon is. And if you're going to eat one meal, it will be at that time of day. Now, if you were going to eat two meals, then you would choose based on what is convenient for your schedule. You would choose breakfast and lunch, or perhaps a breakfast and a late lunch, or you would choose lunch and a early dinner. We want to keep that feeding window as narrow as we possibly can. Now, this doesn't mean you have to necessarily restrict your calories. It doesn't actually even mean that you have to change what you're eating if you do not want to. But we're tightening up that window and we are allowing our body to thoroughly digest the food that we're eating. And then it's then we're able to extract as much nutrition out of that food as possible if we're eating it correctly. So if I were to eat a thousand calories and you were to eat a thousand calories, it would make a difference when I ate that meal, when my last meal was, and how I choose to feel about that food. All right, so that's c. Number one, choose. The next one is to chew. You have to chew your food thoroughly because your stomach doesn't have teeth. Chewing your food mechanically starts the breakdown process. So we mechanically start breaking down our food. It unlocks the nutrition that's locked up inside plant cell walls. So plant cells have a coating of cellulose, which we do not make the enzyme to break open. So we actually have to physically break open the cell walls of all the plant matter that we eat. Otherwise, that nutrition goes right through us. So you could be metabolically wasting a lot of energy by not chewing your food properly. Chewing our food helps us taste our food. By tasting our food, it helps us determine at a neurological, subconscious level what macronutrients are coming, how much fat, protein and carbohydrates coming down the pipe so our digestive organs can properly prepare. Chewing our food also mixes our saliva with the food so that the enzymatic digestion process can actually start as well. Once our food is chewed to the consistency of salsa. You want to chew your food, there's no such thing as over chewing. So I just Want to mention that? So if you're concerned you can't over chew your food, you want to break it down as much as you can. And of course, depending on what you're chewing, you might have to chew it more or less. And. But chewing is so vital to your overall health and wellness, and it slows the whole process down. Chewing puts us in a relaxed state, which is the next thing I'm going to talk about. So make sure you're chewing your food. 30 to 45 bites, depending on how well you chew, is going to usually be enough. And you want to try to minimize drinking too much water. I find that when people drink too much water with their food, they don't chew it properly and they just wash it down instead of chewing it. So chew it, break it down, and your stomach will thank you. The next thing is chill. So you want to choose the right foods, you want to chew those foods and you want to chill. You want to be in a relaxed state because we want to send blood to the digestive organs. We want to send blood flow to the gut, not to the arms and legs. So when we're stressed out, we're going to send blood flow to the arms and legs. I always tell my niece and nephew that, and my son as well, that if you're standing, your stomach doesn't work. So sit down, enjoy your meal, take your time, chew your food and be in a state of relaxation. Be in a state of digestion. We call this autonomic pairing. All right, now that brings me to number four. Number four is to cherish. You want to be grateful for that meal you're having now more than ever. There's so many people involved in putting that food on your table, from the people that planted the seed to nurture the seeds, to pick the food. If you're eating plants, for example, packaged the food, shipped it, shelved it, put it in the grocery bag for you, and then you brought it home and somebody prepared it for you or you prepared it for yourself. So many amazing steps and so much infrastructure required for that simple salad to end up on your table. So be grateful for that. And that's going to put you in a state of being more parasympathetic, which is going to help you digest your food more thoroughly. All right, that brings me to number five. Number five is to check. And to check means visually check and inspect your stool every day. Every time you go to the bathroom, you should visually inspect your stool. And I'm not saying to take out a microscope. You're not going to really see much. But make sure there's no undigested food in your stool. Make sure it's not a funky color, like a clay color, a light clay color, or that it's not super dark, or there isn't blood in your stool. Right. We want to make sure that there isn't any physical and visual abnormalities to our stool. We also want to take a quick whiff can. Okay. And you'll know if this is the case. Your stool should be relatively odorless. If it has a strong odor to it, then you're probably not digesting specifically your proteins very well or your fats are not being digested and they're rancidifying inside your gut. So a healthy diet and healthy digestion is going to result in relatively odorless stool. Believe it or not, it's true. Okay, so that's number five is to check. Now, if you want to take that a step further, you. You might want to do a microscopic inspection of your stool. And what that means is you're going to be able to inspect your stool through a lab. And a lab is going to help you identify if there's any parasites or pathogens or anything like that that's going on that could be causing issues at a biological level. Right. It could be causing inflammation. It could be causing an immune overreaction. It could be causing leaky gut or permeability, or there could be bacterial imbalances. So once a year, get a stool test from your functional medicine practitioner to see if there's anything going on that you can't see visually. Even if your gut feels great, it's a good idea to get tested so that you could rule something out before it becomes problematic. So there you have it. Five tips. Number one is choose. Number two is to chew your food, then chill and then cherish and then check. I hope that helps. And here's to your amazing metabolic health. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.
