During your family dinner this week, think about slowing down to help strengthen the muscles in your jaw and also practice aligning your head so that you are able to swallow better.
For a video to see how to properly head ramp back, head to raising_healthyhumans on IG
Episode 7.2 movement snack for family dinnertime. So this week I had mentioned about sitting down at the dinner with your family and making sure to take time to slow down while you eat. And there are a couple of reasons that you will want to do that. One is what I had mentioned, when you slow down, it allows you the opportunity to chew your food better, basically masticating your food so that when you swallow, you have one created more enzymes during the chewing process that will help to digest the food better. But it will also help allow more nutrients in because you've broken them down into smaller particles. So therefore, you're able to pull the nutrients into your system better. The other reason you want to practice slowing down has to do with the actual chewing itself. So just like you are told to do weight bearing exercises to keep your bones strong, you have a lot of bones within your jaw, so you want to make sure that you're keeping them strong. And a lot of our chewing of our food has been outsourced. Whether you drink a lot of smoothies, therefore the food is being masticating by the blender, or we cook things more. So we're not eating as many raw ingredients like vegetables, crunchy vegetables, we cook them, so it softens them. Or there are even things where instead of having nuts, like a full almond, many times we'll eat them sliced rather than full. So it doesn't provide our jaw to chew quite as much. We have all these bones in our jaw. And when we chew, we're providing that weight bearing of the muscles and the bone to be working through that process. And like I said, if you're allowing everything to already be kind of soft, before it enters your mouth, then your bones don't have to do as much work. So that's one reason we want to work on slowing down to provide the opportunity to create more of the enzymes but also provide the opportunity for our teeth and bones in our jaw to help them work a little bit more. The next thing that I want you to do, which is more of a posture, exercise to practice, and it has to do with our forward head posture. So most of us because as I say most of us, I mean, what is very common in our society in our Western society today is this forward head posture because we are looking at our phones looking at our computers driving in this rounded position, we're sitting a lot, so our chin juts forward. And our because our chin juts forward, we then have to also, our eyes like to look at the horizon. So we then kind of do this little lift as well, so that we've jutted our head into this forward posture, you may also recognize it as text neck. So if you think about sitting at the dinner table, chewing your foods, and then swallowing your food, your neck is now more like a bent straw when it goes down when the food is going down. So it increases your chance of choking, especially as you get older, because your throat muscles have to work harder to get the food to go down to your stomach. So we want to work on eliminating or decreasing the bend in our neck for it to go down. And this is something that I have found through Katie Bowman. She has a bio mechanist and I follow her work. And this was something that she had in her blog and also in one of her books called alignment matters where she talks about the straw. So basically what you're doing is we want to work on pulling that head back so that it is in better alignment. Now we don't just try to force our head back because that's not going to be the best alignment. What we are going to do and you can practice it right now with me and then when we sit down at the dinner table, I want you to practice it as well. You're going to draw up your chin just slightly and then you're going to think about it If you had a ponytail in your hair, not one that sits all the way up on top of your head, but a ponytail in your hair, you're going to drop your changes slightly, and you're going to pull that ponytail back, and it's kind of ramping up slightly. So pull back and lift up and then think about lengthening through the back of the spine. So you're lengthening all the way up through the back of the spine. And the goal is to get the ear. So there's a little spot on your ear. Right where your ear lobe is, you want that to be in alignment with your shoulder, a place of video in our community and also on Instagram for you so that you can see what I'm talking about. But you want that in alignment. So the more you can practice this head ramping back the better that you will be working on straightening your alignment so you don't have such forward head posture. So that is it. That is your movement snack this week is to slow down at the dinner table and pay attention to your posture when it comes to where your head is while you are eating dinner. I hope you enjoyed it. As always, you can go to our Instagram page raising underscore healthy humans. You can also join our Facebook community form sit mom and we will have videos in both places so that you can see what I'm talking about in regards to posture. And that's pretty much it. I hope you have a wonderful day.