We are almost there! Welcome to the final week 4!

And so three weeks have past. How are you feeling?

We’re coming to the last week of the program so you must feel the difference in your body by now. 

This week, we are continuing with the same, by now familiar, approach. Below you will find the meal plan and grocery shopping list for week 4. We already have all the recipes we need for this week.

Today, I would like to focus on the impact stress has on our digestion.

You probably have heard about the fight or flight response. 

In an ideal situation when we are eating, the parasympathetic nervous system is dormant, so the digestive and lymph systems are fully activated. As we’re calmly chewing our food our stomach makes digestive juices that stimulate the intestinal tract and our lymph system can quickly deal with any viruses, yeast, fungi or bacteria. 

If we sense some danger our body makes a shift in energy.

Instead of focusing on proper digestion, our adrenaline levels go up and energy goes towards our skeletal muscles, ready for a fight or flight. As soon as the danger is no longer there the energy goes back to digesting our food. 

Unfortunately this is not exactly how things happen for us humans.

As we can reply many events in our mind, we are often either stressed about our future or angry and sad about our past. Since we have the capacity of turning even the smallest problem to a big problem by constantly thinking about it, a constant stress exposure can affect our digestion. 

I have an entire article on how stress can make us gain weight and you can read it here.

There are a few things you can do to ensure proper digestion of the food you eat: