Secret 1: Eat Until You Are Only Eight Parts Full

The first 'secret' in Sally Beare's book "50 Secrets of the World's Longest Living People" is based on a Japanese saying 'hara bachi ba' or 'eat until you are only eight parts full'.  Eating in moderation sounds like a sensible suggestion, however, unlike cars we do not come equipped with a petrol or gasoline gauge.  How do you know when you are 'eight parts full'?  Several tricks can be employed here.  One, as a Swiss friend once suggested and which is very easy to do but hard adhere to is to lay down your silverware between bites.  Easy to do, isn't it?  However, when you are in a hurry, you can't wait to shove in the next bite and that fork and knife better be at the ready!  Laying down your silverware between bites allows your brain that extra bit of time to register the fullness of your stomach.  Nowadays we are in such a rush and often so absent from the present moment that we do not take the time to listen to ourselves.  So while accurately judging the exact moment of 'eight parts of fullness' seems impossible, we can slow down, take our time, take a break and allow the rest of our awareness to catch up with our absence of hunger.  I remember meeting an older Buddhist priest during a hike on Lantau island in Hong Kong many years ago and marveling when this gentleman who looked like he was in his mid sixties, with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, smiled and stated that he was, in fact, 20 years older than my estimate.  "Wait!" the slim, sprightly monk in orange robes said, "let me go get my identity card so I can prove to you that I am indeed 85 years old!" Astonished, my hiking buddy and I asked him his secret to aging youthfully.  "Ah, that is simple to answer! I do not eat much!"  Indeed, Sally Beare asks: how many overweight centenarians do you know?  How many obese people do you know who reach an advanced age?  In fact the Guinness Book of World Records may showcase extremely fat people but has yet to record one such person reaching old age.

Not only is it judicious to be moderate about food intake, if you are going to be modest about calorie intake why not ensure that every calorie is the best you can get?  I know men who insist on filling their precious cars with the most expensive gasoline on the market, yet when it comes to their own source of energy do not think twice about eating cheap, low-quality, highly processed food.  Why?  Why take better care of a machine you will probably replace in less than ten years than a body you expect to function at top gear for over 80 years?  Why not take better care of that one body that will be with you for life than a piece of replaceable, soulless machine?

The main point I take away from Sally Beare's first secret is: eat little, but make sure the little you eat consists of nutritious, high-quality ingredients.  

And she does not stop there.  Eat little.  Eat nutritious.  And she also throws in a third thought into this first secret! Reduce the amount of saturated fat such as meat and cheese as well as the amount of refined carbohydrates such as white flour and rice.  Phew!  A lot of different suggestions in this one secret!  Rice?  Does that mean that the 100+ million Asians who eat rice daily are condemned to a short life replete with illness?   Too many new ideas!  Rather than bombard her readers with more suggestions, I wish Beare had instead delved even deeper into the history of prominent thinkers who support her first point: eat until you are eight parts full.  

Oh, and another thought.  Beare states that the natural life span of human beings is 120 years.  120 years?  How many people do you know who are older than 99 years?  Sure, why not live 120 years if these are healthy, happy years for you AND your loved ones?  But with the current SAD (standard American diet), reality looks (and feels) painfully different.

So how about the next time you sit down to eat be aware of when you are full and then put the rest of the food on your plate away for later?  I guarantee, sooner or later you WILL be hungry again and you'll be glad to finish off your food then.  I've done it and it works very well.  Rather than stuff myself and try to finish all the food on my plate and feel uncomfortable, I set it aside knowing full well that hunger will revisit.  At that point it's a pleasure to find and finish leftovers.  Remember the sprightly 85 year old who easily looked 20 years younger?  Less is more.

Another vivid image concerning food that springs to mind is a LIFE magazine article from the 60ies that portrays all the food that a young boy will consume on his journey to adulthood.  Now imagine all the food you will be consuming during the remainder of your life!  Imagine that huge mountain of food.  What do you want this mountain to look like?  And any chance you could make that mountain a little smaller?  Your guts will thank you for reducing their life-time workload by giving you better health.

Perhaps you have read "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" by Stieg Larsson?  Poor Stieg, just like his protagonist he was a chain smoker and  caffeine addict.  Stieg passed away from a heart attack just before his 50th birthday.  And he still had so many open projects!  Might Stieg be working on the final seven volumes he had planned in addition to the Millennium Trilogy if he had followed a 'low calorie, high nutrient' diet?  Perhaps.

you are choosing to eat. Is someone holding a gun to your head forcing you to eat huge quantities of empty calories?  Did you mother beg you to drink more soda pop and eat more cookies?  You have a choice of what you eat, the rest of your digestive system does not.  All it can do is make the best of what you shove into it.  And as amazing as our body is, it does not have the gift of miraculously turning junk food into superfoods.  Instead, it quietly suffers along with the rest of you. Why not go easy on your digestive system?  Would you like your boss to overwork you?  And even if s/he does, you do have the option to quit.  The only way your body can quit is to get sick and worse.  So why not treat the part of your body that extracts energy and immune enhancers from the food you eat with a bit of love and respect?  It's so much more than plumbing.

So to summarize: the 'first secret' of healthy centenarians is eat less and eat better OR decrease the volume while increasing the quality or the 'NQ', the nutritional quotient (as in IQ and EQ; let's go for NQ here.  Low NQ => more cancer, greater obesity, higher chance of diabetes, greater likelihood of heart attacks.  High NQ = better health?).  In fact, let's make this real simple.  You may have, time and again, struggled to decrease the amount.  Forget about it.  Keep it simple.  Go easy on yourself.  Forget about the quantity.  As a New Year's present for  that unrecognized part of your body, just concentrate on eating food that is high in nutrients.  The rest will follow.  How many celery sticks and carrots can you really eat in one sitting?  Happy New Year! 


Take-home lesson: eat in moderation, stop before you feel full, then wait a while.  Chances are that you have eaten enough (it takes a while for the stomach to update the brain).