Why does food always taste better at a picnic?
Why does your morning coffee seem so much more satisfying when you take it outside to your front doorstep?
Why do you never seem to feel the same heartburn or bloating or indigestion when you eat lunch outside on your lunch break instead of inside at your desk?
Why is cooking dinner over an outdoor campfire or grill so much more fulfilling than cooking the same meal indoors?
That’s because eating while connected to the earth outside has a profound impact on your digestion — supporting the function of your entire digestive tract, from your esophagus to your colon and everything in between! — while meanwhile directly impacting your ability to feel full and satiated, even enhancing absorption by decreasing inflammation, which also helps with recovery after a meal.
From every single angle, eating grounded helps:
- putting you more deeply in touch with your hunger and satiation
- helping you digest and absorb your nutrients better
- improving gut motility and improving bowel movements
- boosting your metabolism and keeping weight gain at bay
- even decreasing digestive discomfort after eating
Even if you eat completely organic, fresh, raw, dairy-free, gluten-free, best-diet-in-the-world you can easily still have irritable bowel issues, nausea, heartburn, consitpation, indigestion, or bloating, or pain after your meal. That’s because even healthy foods can cause inflammation in your gut and be hard to digest.
The truth is that you can’t fully resolve bowel inflammation without being grounded. And unfortunately, in our modern world, more people literally eat in their car, under stress and totally ungrounded, than eat outside on the earth.
Today I’d like to invite you to give it a try to see (and more importantly, feel) the difference in your digestion when you are eating grounded.
If you are going to eat food for a few minutes anyway at some point today, you might as well make that a time of healing and support by doing it outside, grounded.
Grab a drink and a snack (or your next meal) and come get grounded with me. And as we share this grounded eating activity together, notice all the improvements in your digestion you feel when you use grounding to support gut health.
10 Minute Grounded Mindful Eating Practice
Now that you’ve felt the difference, you’re ready to dive deep with me into the science behind why grounding helps your body select, consume, digest, absorb, eliminate and even feel more satiated from food so much better than eating when you are ungrounded.
That’s because the digestive support you get from grounding goes way beyond just your digestive tract working better… it actually helps support the entire gut-brain axis.
To share why grounding is so helpful in protecting the connection between our digestive tract and our central nervous system, including our mindframe, I wrote a medical review on this topic and published it in The Journal of Medical Clinical Research & Reviews.
You can read the original article right here and share it with others as well as print it out and take it to your in person physician:
So this summer, a very easy, extremely enjoyable way to boost your healing is to have a goal of eating one meal a week outside.
Go ahead and get your calendar out now and schedule it in:
- Maybe every Sunday afternoon you will have a picnic lunch at a different park, slowly exploring all the parks in your area all summer long.
- Maybe every Monday after work you’ll simply take the dinner that you normally eat inside and walk outside to eat it on your front door stoop or patio, with feet on pavers or sidewalk or brick.
- Maybe every Thursday you’ll take a lunch break at work and take your brown bag down to the bench outside your building, slipping off your shoes for a few minutes.
- Maybe every Saturday morning you’ll start off your weekend with taking coffee and yogurt outside for a picnic breakfast.
- Maybe every Friday night you end the week by bringing a glass of wine or a cup of tea outside, sitting on a towel or blanket under the stars and taking in the cosmos.
Adding grounding to your meals doesn’t cost a thing and it can be as easy as keeping a towel in your car all summer long to sit on whenever you can have an impromptu picnic — try to have a goal of replacing eating in your car with eating grounded outside this summer. Every time you would normally be eating a meal on the go, just pull over instead and sit on a patch of grass at a park, or outside of your workplace on a bench, or on a sidewalk curb, under a tree, pulling off at a a rest stop and taking just 10 minutes to eat grounded instead.
Don’t like that idea? Here are some more ideas for you:
10 Ideas To Use Grounding To Improve Digestion:
- Drink a cup of hot water (with a teaspoon of apple cider vinegar or lemon juice & honey) outside while grounding in the morning dew each AM to gift yourself a daily grounding detox for your gut.
- Take your morning coffee and yogurt (or oatmeal, or cereal, or toast, etc…) outside onto your front doorstep to eat a grounded breakfast before heading off to school/work… like I show you in the video above.
- At lunch, take your brown bag outside to the sidewalk in front of your building, or the picnic bench in the back of your office plaza, or anywhere you can touch the earth (maybe something as simple as the sidewalk that surrounds your parking area) and eat a grounded lunch outside for an instant pick-me-up to get you through your afternoon indoors.
- Once a week, turn your dinner into a picnic by grabbing your plates and taking them outside, eating al fresco… see if you notice a improvement not only in your digestion but your sleep that night too!
- If you are adventurous and want to cook your dinner outside (not just take it outside to eat…) there are countless amazing campfire meal recipes and grilling recipes waiting for you for free on the internet, or to motivate you even more, treat yourself to a beautifully illustrated campfire meal cookbook and enjoy picking out your next grounded dinner.
- Once a month, invite all of your friends and family to meet up at a park for a potluck meal enjoyed outdoors in a free park pavilion. As you know if you’ve seen this super old video I made for you here, just touching the concrete floor of the pavilion is instantly grounding! Bring your frisbee or football and get some grounded exercise in while you are at it!
- As evening draws, take your nightly hot cup of herbal tea (or hot chocolate!) outside to drink in the warmth while looking up at the stars overhead… the most peaceful and centering way to ground that I know of.
- Outdoors not your thing? You can still eat grounded by sitting on (or resting your feet on) an organic grounding mat.
- Still have some indigestion? Consider holding a soothing grounded hot water bottle over your abdomen during or after meals to help soothe gut peristalsis with powerful grounding support to your vagal nerve, while dissipating bloating and heartburn with relaxing heat, all at the same time.
- Want to add on some more digestive support? Take a big glass of water outside, along with these gut supportive digestive supplements, and support your digestion with:
- probiotics (not only good for boosting immunity, these also help balance your gut flora so that you can break down and absorb nutrients with less inflammation and bloating, resolving irritable bowel issues as well)
- betaine HCL and digestive enzymes (especially important for those with gastritis or gall bladder issues)
- l-glutamine and aloe vera to help repair the gut lining and resolve leaky gut issues
- and for a dramatic improvement in digestion, DAO to decrease the gut’s histamine response to triggering foods
Find my favorite brands of each of these supplements, the ones I’ve seen truly work time and time again, in this Gut Healing Protocol here:
Want More Support? I’ve Got You
If you want even more support to safely, easily, and effectively lose weight in a way that supports your innate health, I’ve got you. I directly support your weight loss goals in my Weight Release and Reset online health class. Jump into class right here.
I’ve based this course directly off of the medical literature and my 25 years of experience helping to support patients with their weight loss goals. You’d be surprised that your body naturally knows what weight is the perfect one for you, and it can sustain it at this perfect weight effortlessly once you naturally align your metabolism.
I’ll show you how in a very non-threatening, supportive, uplifting way.
It’s not about being rigid or militant or hard on yourself, in fact, it’s the exact opposite. The harder you are on yourself, the harder it is to align with your healthiest version of you. There are several other things that are even more important than what you eat that dictate what you weight… and without knowing what those things are, you just can’t lose weight.
Understand the things that sabotage weight loss and the weight releases, naturally. Let’s do it together right now:
To your innate, beautiful, powerful health!
xoxoxo, Laura Koniver MD
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