Many years ago, I gave a lunchtime talk — “Staying Healthy Under Pressure” — for the ABC News team in New York City. As it happened, the day I presented was the same day the United States announced its restoration of full diplomatic ties with Cuba.

It was, in other words, a breaking-news day. I remember from my brief sojourn at the Huffington Post what those days are like: Totally nuts.

It’s a scenario to which virtually any hardworking person can relate. Unexpected things happen in the midst of already-stressful conditions, progressively nudging us toward our last frayed edge. And through all this, we’re expected to perform at our best.

Every day, we are all pushed and pulled in so many different directions. A lot of us seem to be living from one crisis to the next. And yet somehow, damn the torpedoes, we also gotta be thinking about our health.

Because let’s face it, once our health starts to go, we’ve got a whole new set of crises on our hands. Among other things, we’re likely to find ourselves wading through the difficult choices and alienating bureaucracies of our country’s broken healthcare system.

And all of those important things we have to do? Yeah, they suddenly get a whole lot harder.

How Can We Hope to Cope?

Welcome to one of the central conundrums of our time: How can we safeguard the vitality that is so critical to our effectiveness while living in a society that works against our health AND regularly stretches us well beyond our natural capacity?

This is the head-scratcher around which I wrote my 2020 book, The Healthy Deviant: A Rule Breaker’s Guide to Being Healthy in an Unhealthy World. But even back in 2014, I was talking about it with the folks at ABC .

Here are 10 survival tips I shared with them back then, and that I believe will work just as well for you now :

1. Take three minutes in the morning for you. I call this my Morning Minutes practice, and it’s one of three Renegade Rituals I see as the bedrock essentials of Healthy Deviance. Before you check your digital devices or turn on any other electronics or media (especially the news!), simply spend a few minutes doing something low key that you enjoy. Light a candle, step outside to look up at the sky, pet your dog, check in with your body-mind. Or just sit with a cup of coffee or tea and enjoy the feeling of your body-mind coming into waking gradually. Cultivating even a few moments of sanity and autonomy first thing in the morning can alter the way you relate to the rest of your day.

2. Make and eat a whole-foods breakfast. Try my “Quick-Trick Snack Stack” for a no-cook alternative, or fry up an egg and some greens. Either meal will fuel your body for hours and give you the nutrition your brain needs to operate well.

3. Take your vitamins. Your body goes through B-vitamins and many other nutrients at a much faster clip when you are stressed, and being short on essential nutrients can radically diminish your mental and physical capacity. So even if you’re eating a healthy diet, it’s wise to supplement with some basics. A multivitamin, multimineral, vitamin D, and essential-fatty-acid supplement proves a good basic combo for most — but of course, check with a qualified health professional to be sure.

4. Keep protein-rich snacks or a protein drink mix with you at work. Protein staves of hunger, helps balance blood sugar, and safeguards your lean tissue. So favor proteins, veggies, and healthy fats (like avocados or nut butters) over chips, cereals, crackers, or granola bars. Blood-sugar crashes and carb cravings will become a thing of the past, and your brain will thank you for the extra amino acids.

5. Master a few body-weight exercises you can do anywhere and do mini-sets between meetings or as mid-project  breaks. I like planks, pushups, wall squats, and lunges. Good news: Recent research published in the December issue of the journal Nature suggests that even a few single-minute bouts of exercise can make a big difference to your overall mortality risk — and they’ll help you feel and function better right now, too.

6. Set a timer to trigger 15-to-20 minute breaks (what I call Ultradian Rhythm Breaks, or URBs) every two hours. This will help keep your body from building up inflammatory stress byproducts and improve your ability to bounce back from the day’s demands. URBs also prime your body and brain to operate at peak effectiveness throughout the day, improving mood and creativity, reducing errors and accidents, regulating blood sugar and hormones, and supporting healthy metabolism.

7. Take a weekly yoga, meditation, or relaxation class — even if it’s in place of a fitness class. You might also schedule some recurring bodywork sessions (massage, cranial sacral, etc.) if you can afford that. But if you can’t, don’t let that stop you from taking what I call “Just Lie Down” breaks. The more your stress-fueled sympathetic (fight-or-flight) nervous system is activated, the more you need to nudge your parasympathetic (rest-relax-digest-and-connect) nervous system to offset inflammation and angst.

8. Keep a water bottle with a squeeze of lemon, splash of juice, or slice of cucumber within reach at all times. Plain water is okay, but adding that little touch of flavor sets up a “return to substance” relationship between your brain and the water. As a result, you’ll sip more regularly throughout the day, stay better hydrated, and function better. You might also find this help ward off headaches (where dehydration is a well recognized trigger).

9. Use your commute to decompress versus multitask. Transition time is hugely valuable time. And the absolute best thing you can do with it might very well be nothing at all — thereby giving your brain and body a chance to unwind. Drive or ride in silence for a while, practice deep breathing, or listen to something calming rather than being in continuous contact with your handheld or shoveling more information into your already overloaded brain. Your body-mind is probably already overloaded, and it desperately needs quiet time to process and organize what’s in there!

10. See symptoms as signals for change. If you’re doing all of the above regularly and still suffering, trust that that’s your body’s way of letting you know its needs are not being met. You are suffering from what I call “Pissed-Off Body Syndrome” (use my Weird-Symptom Checklist to assess your current score). Make it your business to find out what shifts are necessary for you to bring your body back to its happy place. Then do those things.

I realize that last suggestion is a whole lot easier said than done. Frankly, none of us came into this world prepared to live the way we are living now. And since our world is changing so fast, learning the skills necessary to survive and thrive has become a lifetime endeavor.

The more stress you’re under, the more important those skills become. So there’s no better time than now to start raising your game.

For more on how to do just that, check out my book, The Healthy Deviant; my podcast, The Living Experiment, or join my 4-phase “Healthy Deviant U” program. 

Let’s talk a bit about poo. Oh, you’d rather not? I understand. It’s not something most of us would choose to discuss in polite company.

But I really hope you’ll at least consider what I have to say on the topic, and here’s why: As it relates to your health, what exits your body is just as important as what goes in.

Your poo offers a view into your state of well-being. Basically, if the stuff coming out of you isn’t in optimal form, it suggests that some things inside of you aren’t going as well as they could, either.

The problem is, we rarely talk about our bowel movements (except in those families where they are discussed endlessly), so most people don’t have a lot of information to draw on regarding what is and is not considered good in the world of poo.

That’s actually quite a complex scientific subject, because at the biochemical level, there’s a lot going on in our waste that the naked eye can’t see.

Viewed under a powerful-enough microscope, a stool sample can reveal the health of the intestinal system, the quality of our digestion and nutrient assimilation, food sensitivities, our bodywide levels of inflammation, and the presence of certain pathogens, cancers, autoimmune disorders, and more.

Then there’s the study of the microbiome, that community of microorganisms that live in and on our bodies. Microbiome research — much of which relies on close examination of stool samples — is rapidly advancing, and it’s revealing that the balance of flora and fauna in our intestinal systems can have a huge impact not just on bowel health but on virtually every other part of physical and mental well-being.

So, poo matters way more than you might think. In fact, it is so powerful that many doctors now employ it as a medication, introducing healthy stool samples into beleaguered intestinal tracts (a procedure known as a fecal transplant) to help repopulate them with good bacteria.

This strategy is now being used to resolve a range of stubborn medical conditions (including, but not limited to, bowel disorders) that other medical interventions fail to treat.

Researchers are also exploring what they call the gut–brain axis, and finding that the balance of microorganisms in the gut can powerfully affect the brain, mood, and behavior, potentially playing a significant role in depression and anxiety.

There’s so much fascinating science to explore in this realm, but even without advanced lab testing, it’s possible to learn a lot about the state of your body by simply observing and evaluating your own poo situation on a daily basis.

Forgive me as I get a bit graphic here (and perhaps don’t read this while you are eating), but the specifics really matter.

Too often, when doctors ask their patients about their bowel movements, they get stock, flustered answers like, “Er, normal, I guess,” simply because most of us have never been educated about what “normal” means in this context.

It’s important to note that poo does vary from person to person, so generalizations can be dicey, but there are some guidelines that go for just about everybody. Three of the most easily discerned factors to consider are form, frequency, and comfort.

Form

A healthy bowel movement is generally semisoft (vs. hard, pelletized, or liquid), and it comes out in a single continuous curve or coil that reflects the curving shape of your colon. (A disgusting but helpful reference point: A good poo comes out of your body kind of like firm, soft-serve ice cream comes out of a dispenser. Sorry, I know, so gross — but true.)

If it is a mixture of solid and liquid, that comes out in clumps, or that alternates between very hard and very soft, that suggests something in your system is wonky.

Similarly, if you see undigested food particles, or a floating haze of what looks like oil or mucus, that could be a sign you’re not breaking down and absorbing nutrients as well as you could be.

The form, texture, and color of your poo is often a direct reflection of what you have been recently eating and drinking. So, occasional poo weirdness may just be an indication your body isn’t wild about its recent care and feeding.

But ongoing, observable poo problems can be a reflection of more serious and chronic health issues, including food sensitivities, infections, microbiome imbalances, compromised bowel mechanics, and more.

The presence of blood in your stool (which may show up as red or black) can indicate problems at various stages of your digestive tract, and is best evaluated by a health professional.

If you tend to flush without looking, you may not recognize any of these signals. So basically, when you go, you gotta look.

Frequency

While a daily poo is the standard for most people, a lot of progressive health professionals consider that a bare minimum.

Aiming for the smooth and steady transport of your food through the digestive system, they would prefer to see you go two or even three times a day, or as often as you eat a meal.

Logically, it makes sense that your body might be happiest eliminating batches of solids in more or less the same rhythm as it consumes them. But feeling an urgent need to go more frequently than that (or at alarming and unanticipated intervals) may be a sign that your digestion is off, that you ate something that disagrees with you, that you are overstressed, or that your bowel is irritated and inflamed.

Having less than one good bowel movement a day may suggest a holdup in the digestive system, which could be due to a variety of dietary and lifestyle factors, such as inadequate hydration, nutrients, or fiber; excess stress; or unidentified food intolerances (gluten and dairy being prime culprits for many).

Both overactive and sluggish bowel activity can produce all kinds of trouble over time, from skin issues to bodywide inflammation to chronic disease, so if you aren’t currently in a happy cadence with your bowel movements, it’s worth investigating and resolving the source of that trouble.

Comfort

How you feel before, during, and after your bowel movements (as well as how you feel about them) may actually be the ultimate consideration.

Bowel movements are meant to be easy, quick, painless, and anxiety-free endeavors. If they’re not, don’t panic. There are lots of things you can do to resolve your issues.

The first thing to know: What-ever you find worrisome about your poo — whether that’s not being able to go, or being stressed by gassiness, bloating, or unexpected-poo surprises — it’s not something you have to tolerate.

On the contrary, it’s something to acknowledge as a stress signal from your body and explore further, perhaps with a qualified integrative physician or other digestive-health professional.

Seek out a partner who will help you address the root cause of your problem, not just the symptoms, because whatever is messing with your poo is probably also messing with a lot of your bodily functions.

The sooner you get the health of your digestive system handled, the sooner you’ll start to feel healthy, strong, energetic, and clear. You still might not want to talk a lot about poo, but you’ll have a lot more respect for the essential role it plays in your life.

You know one phrase that has always bothered me? “Portion control.” Blech. There’s just something so judgmental and white-knuckled about it.

To me, it speaks of food meted out with equal parts precision and disapproval. It smacks of appetites denied, hands reaching for seconds and being slapped away. It sounds “hangry.”

Still, for as much as the phrase portion control might rub me the wrong way, I find the prospect of totally out-of-control portions to be similarly disconcerting.

Here in the United States, the latter problem seems to be the more pressing public-health threat. But, in fact, I think they are inherently intertwined.

A 2015 study reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics found that 92 percent of restaurant meals served in this country significantly “exceeded typical energy requirements for a single eating occasion.” Look, I know it’s probably no newsflash that a lot of the restaurant meals eaten in this country are calorically overdense. But 92 percent? That’s a lot.

And that eating overload isn’t just happening at restaurants. It’s occurring in many homes, where prepared, packaged, and takeout foods now dominate kitchen tables — if anybody even eats at tables anymore.

It also holds sway in many workplaces, where all-day grazing, snacking, and sweet-beverage-guzzling are now the norm. Of course, it’s encouraged just about everywhere in between: Starbucks recently introduced a new, 31-ounce Trenta serving option; and cookies the size of your face are routinely offered for “grab-and-g0” at checkout counters.

As a fleet of respected researchers and authors, including Michael Moss, Michael Pollan, Gary Taubes, and Brian Wansink, have suggested, these over-eating trends have been designed into our food culture by industrial interests that have a lot to gain by getting us to eat — and buy — ever more.

They’ve done that by exploiting our natural eating preferences and manipulating them toward increasingly salty, sweet, and engineered-to-be-irresistible flavors and textures.

They’ve done it by providing us with huge serving sizes at seemingly bargain-basement prices (thanks mostly to industrial-agricultural subsidies financed by taxpayers).

And they’ve done it by lobbying intensively to make sure their business models (which include aggressive marketing to children and teens) aren’t effectively challenged.

Both the reengineering of our palates and the expansion of standard portions have grown more extreme over the past few decades, indelibly altering what several generations have come to think of as “normal” food products, serving sizes, and eating patterns.

The result, not surprisingly, is that we are now eating an astonishing quantity of food. Well, some food.

Just as the rampant overeating of heavily processed foods poses a serious threat to our health, it seems likely that the rampant undereating of whole foods (like the brightly colored vegetables that have been all but crowded out of our daily diets) may soon be understood as an equally grave threat.

Why? Because a lot of those healthy foods quell inflammation, issue healing instructions, and keep our genes functioning properly. Without them, even though our plates may be piled high, our bodies remain undernourished. Even as a great many of us surpass our daily calorie quotas, a bunch of our cellular functions, genetic circuitry, and metabolic pathways are scrounging for raw materials.

Data from the Scientific Report of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee suggests that a significant percentage of U.S. adults aren’t getting the National Academy of Medicine’s (NAM) estimated average requirements of vitamins A, D, E, and C, as well as folate, calcium, magnesium, and fiber.

Relative to our heavy intake of omega-6 fatty acids (prevalent in most commercial vegetable oils, processed foods, fast foods, and meats), our ratio of omega-3 fatty acids (found in fish, grassfed meats, nuts, seeds, and avocados) is, according to guidance from the NAM, woefully low.

In the realm of nutrition — as in all realms — both “not enough” and “too much” of anything can spell trouble. Unfortunately, we live in a food world that can make it hard to find the middle ground between these extremes.

So how do we make sense of our own appetites? How do we make peace with what often feels like an  uncontrollable desire to eat more than our bodies know how to handle? And at the same time, how do we get more in touch with our bodies’ healthy cravings — the ones telling us we actually need more of some things, not less?

I think it comes down to a reprioritizing of quality over quantity, and a refining of the ability to differentiate between the two.

That, in turn, calls for both exposure and experimentation. So here are a few great places to start:

1. If you’re ready to go all in, try a Whole30. Basically, this involves 30 days of eating high-quality whole foods while simultaneously eliminating grains, dairy, added sugars, caffeine, alcohol, soy, and corn (more at www.whole30.com). Too intense? Consider embarking on a more inclusive whole-food eating strategy (like Harvard nutritionist David Ludwig’s Always Hungry? program) that encourages you to eat a plethora of nutrition-dense foods while also helping you master some essential healthy-eating skills in the process.

2. Add before you remove. If you’re not interested in a full-scale eating intervention, try a more nuanced approach. Rather than restricting the foods you are currently eating, try adding moderate to generous helpings of healthy whole foods (especially nonstarchy vegetables and healthy fats) to the mix. Add a big green salad or an extra serving of colorful veggies with olive oil and lemon to as many meals as you can. Have an avocado or a can of sardines for a snack. As your nutrition and fiber intake increase, your body will naturally recalibrate, steadying your energy and appetite, reducing your cravings, and making it easier to manage subsequent nutritional adjustments.

3. Reverse ratios. Often, when we are presented with problematically big portions, the substrate is a cheap, grain-based filler — pasta, rice, bread, pastry, cereal, or pizza crust. More nutritious and flavorful ingredients (like fresh produce) are presented as toppings, flavorings, or mere condiments. Try reversing these proportions, and notice how it influences your eating experiences. If you have a robust serving of vegetables with meat or plant-sourced protein as a base, could you enjoy a smaller serving of pasta on the side? For breakfast, could you dig into a generous bowl of berries, nuts, and seeds with just a handful of cereal sprinkled over the top? With enough yummy fillings, could you have your sandwich open-faced, or tucked into a big romaine leaf rather than a grain-based wrap? Try a few swaps and see what happens.

4. Get comfortable with the cost-benefit tradeoffs. High-quality whole foods often, but not always, cost more than cheap commodity ingredients. But by helping you stay healthier and more satisfied, they deliver a better value over time. (For more on that, check out my last column, “Revolutionary Act No. 33: Care Where Food Comes From.”) Be willing to invest in healthy foods that taste great, even if it means enjoying them in smaller quantities.

Finally, if you do nothing else, just start noticing. Notice the nature of the foods in front of you. Notice how you feel when you eat them. And notice how, as you embrace foods that nourish your senses and your health, concerns with portion control begin to fall away, revealing new adventures in eating enjoyment.

Once upon a time, we humans knew where every single bite of our food came from. For about 2.5 million years, we knew either because we hunted or foraged for it ourselves, or because somebody we knew intimately hunted or foraged for it on our behalf.

Then came the Agricultural Revolution: About 10,000 years ago, for the first time, we started growing and storing grains in significant quantities, domesticating animals for food and milk, and amassing surpluses for storage and trade.

Our diets shifted dramatically as a result. But for a long while afterward, we still had a good sense of where our food came from. Because whatever we weren’t hunting and foraging, we were probably growing and raising for ourselves. Or we were getting it from someone who lived nearby — likely somebody with whom we had some sort of direct relationship.

Over the course of the past thousand years — particularly in the past hundred and most radically in the past 60 — all of that has changed. Very suddenly, in evolutionary terms, after millions of years of humans having a close, direct relationship with their food, that sort of relation-ship became exceedingly rare.

How did this happen? First, a great many of us moved from the wilderness and small villages into bigger cities, places distant from where most foods were found, raised, and grown.

Next, as trade advanced, we were no longer as dependent on local sources. As industrialization and mechanization advanced, we found more efficient ways of mass producing and processing raw ingredients into a wide array of food products with less resemblance to their original form.

It’s only in the past few generations that we’ve become accustomed to eating food grown, raised, or produced by total strangers so far away, and by methods so mechanized and industrialized that we often can’t even tell precisely (or even generally) what our food contains.

In the process, we lost track of where our food comes from — not just geographically but elementally. We lost our consciousness of the nature of food, of the places where our meats and plant foods originate, of how they are raised, and of the eco-systems on which they depend.

Where does meat come from? From the store. On a Styrofoam tray wrapped in plastic. Or from a freezer box, in microwavable nuggets. Where do vegetables come from? From a shelf, can, bag, or box — perhaps prechopped or precooked. And then there’s all those other things we eat: boxed, bagged, shrink-wrapped, factory-produced concoctions of various kinds.

Most of us no longer know how a lot of our foods look on the hoof or on the vine. As chef Jamie Oliver -famously illustrated, many of our school-age children can’t tell a tomato from a potato (much less identify which grows above ground and which grows below).

We don’t know much of anything about our foods’ life cycles, or the conditions of their development. We don’t know what inputs of human and mechanical energy were required to plant, raise, or harvest them.

And unless we are buying them directly from a farmer or some other source we know and trust, we probably have little idea what drugs, pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals might have been involved in our foods’ production.

There are a great many downsides to this — horrific animal cruelty, human-rights abuses, environmental damage, nutritional degradation, food waste, loss of eating pleasure.

Arguably, though, there’s one powerful upside: Our food is cheap. Very cheap, historically speaking.

We may complain bitterly about “whole paycheck” prices, but Ameri-cans today spend only a fraction of what they spent 50 years ago on food as a percentage of their total income.

And while we spend a lot more on processed products, prepared foods, and restaurant meals, Americans spend less per capita on home-cooked food than the citizens of virtually any country in the world.

Why? We simply don’t buy many whole foods, we hardly ever cook at home, and most of the foods we do buy come from the massive, -automated, efficiency-focused machine known as industrial agriculture.

The net result: Most of us have little idea what we are actually eating.

We’re not terribly invested in the quality, safety, fairness, or sustainability of the systems that produce our food. We are unaware of the true costs and externalities of the cheaply priced food products we see piled to the ceilings in big-box grocery stores. And that makes us — and our food systems — vulnerable indeed.

So, how can you build more care into your relationship with food in general? My top five suggestions:

1. Act in your own self-interest. Responsibly raised food is safer, more nutritious, and better tasting by far. It’s also way better for the air, water, and soil; for the pollinators and microbiota that support your food supply; and for countless other factors that determine not just your health but your quality of life and the stability of your economy, your community, and more. When you invest in sustainable, ethical food systems, you invest in your own vitality and in vitality on a grand scale.

2. Be willing to pay a bit more. Conventionally produced food is artificially cheap because the true costs are pawned off on the environment, taxpayers, underpaid workers, and more. You pay those costs and are exposed to those negative effects in a dozen different ways. So you’re much better off paying a bit more on the front end and enjoying the myriad benefits of higher-quality, responsibly raised food.

3. Be willing to pay a bit less. Most heavily processed products (like breakfast cereals, lunch meats, fast food, and soft drinks) are ridiculously overpriced relative to their nutritional value. Transfer some of your processed-food budget toward better-quality whole foods, and value-wise, you’ll be way ahead of the game. Procure local, seasonal, organic, and transitional foods from farmers’ markets, CSAs, and buying clubs, and you’ll enjoy even more exceptional food bargains.

 4. Make a personal connection. Knowing even a single real-life farmer, or visiting the source of even one of your favorite animal or vegetable foods, can radically alter the way you think about the nature and value of food in general. Grow even a single tomato for yourself, and you’ll experience an incomparable thrill. By contrast, visiting, say, an industrial turkey-processing plant (or even driving by an animal-containment lot with your car windows open) can put you off -factory-farmed, commodity meats forever.

 5. Accept the tension inherent in eating. Given how ugly our current conventional food system is, it’s understandable that a lot of people have been opting out of an increasing array of foods they see as unethical, unhealthy, or just plain unappealing. But that’s also given rise to a puritanical eating approach in which virtually nothing is deemed edible, and ortho-rexic self-starvation seems like the only alternative. Clearly, this is not the answer.

The truth is, there is no diet that is 100 percent “pure” or ethically perfect. Plants and animals die every day so that all of us — even hardcore vegans — can eat. (For more on that, see Lierre Keith’s The Vegetarian Myth.) And when we die, we become food for other creatures. You can find that horrible, or beautiful, or both. But you can’t avoid it.

Caring where your food comes from won’t fix everything. It can, however, make the whole process of eating more meaningful, more just, and more nourishing for all involved.

For all our obsessing about what we eat, we pay comparatively little attention to how we eat. And that’s too bad, because our unconscious, stressed, rushed, lonely, and compulsive approach to eating is probably doing more damage to our collective health than our Cinnabon, Krispy Kreme, and Cronut obsessions combined.

First, some science: Just as the nutrients you put into your body create a certain biochemical reality, so do the mindset, attitude, and physical posture you hold while eating.

This is a physiological fact — if you eat while you are hurried, hunched, anxious, and not breathing deeply, your body is going to respond by releasing a cascade of chemicals characteristic of the stress response.

Research shows that stress is inherently antithetical to good digestion and nutrient assimilation. It disrupts metabolism and promotes inflammatory responses throughout the body.

Plus, if you rush, worry, multitask, or zone out while you’re eating, you’re going to be much less likely to fully see, taste, smell, chew, and enjoy your food. That can have a big impact on not just on how well you assimilate your nutrients but whether or not your brain registers your eating experience as a nourishing and satisfying one.

Setting the sheer pleasure of eating aside for moment (don’t worry, we’ll come back to it), let’s focus on the importance of the see-smell-chew-taste process in how your body regulates food intake.

Digestion begins in the mouth, where the brain engages a complex sensory system to assess the biochemical makeup of the food passing under your nose, across your tongue, and past your esophagus.

Your body then releases digestive enzymes, adjusts metabolic gears, and begins sending signals of satiety (fullness or satisfaction) based on what it registers coming across that transom.

But when you gobble your food, or swallow it without having put much conscious attention on it, that complex and sensitive system doesn’t have a chance to fully engage.

As a result, your body is less capable of accurately tracking and optimally processing both the energetic value (i.e., calories) and the nutritional content of the food you are eating.

This means you’re going to have a tendency to eat more. It also means your body is going to be less capable of extracting the full nutritive value of whatever you ingest.

In keeping with the dictates of the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, your body will respond very differently — digestively, hormonally, and metabolically — to food eaten in a panicked fight-or-flight mode than it will to food eaten in a mellow, rest-and-digest mode.

Thanks in part to the actions of hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, insulin, and ghrelin, food eaten in a rushed or stressed state is far more likely to a) cause indigestion, b) be stored as fat, and c) leave you feeling hungry again much sooner. If you want to understand the many reasons why, see “Revolutionary Resources,” below.

Meanwhile, if you need still more reason to take your food-savoring more seriously, consider this: When meals are taken as relaxing, socially satisfying breaks from hyperintense, task-driven parts of our day, they serve as “ultradian-rhythm breaks.” (For more on how these fascinating, oscillating energy patterns work, listen to the “Pause” episode of The Living Experiment podcast, available on iTunes.)

But when we eat at our desks, on the go, or while distracted by other efforts and concerns, our sympathetic nervous systems never get a break. This always-on state contributes to elevated levels of stress hormones, negatively affecting our blood sugar and insulin levels.

That means that as the day wears on, you’re going to be increasingly inclined to eat more of the things that stressed bodies crave, like refined carbohydrates and sweets.

Alternatively, if you are one of those people who respond to stress by losing their appetite or forgetting to eat, you’re that much more likely to wind up in a low-blood-sugar situation where, by the time you do eat, you’re famished or desperate enough that you hardly care what you put in your mouth.

Given all of this, it’s odd that we don’t more highly value conscious eating as an essential healthy-living skill. And it’s dismaying how little energy and attention our culture puts on creating sane, well-paced, and pleasurable eating.

Goodness knows, most of the food-consuming experiences our children are having are not preparing them for a future of conscious eating. And as adults, most of us aren’t winning any awards for modeling ideal eating behaviors, either.

So, what can you do to improve your own approach to eating, and perhaps encourage others to join you? Here are my top suggestions:

1. Focus.

Eliminate all screens from your eating environment. That means no TV, no computer, no smartphone, no iPad. I’d skip books, magazines, and newspapers, too. Forget multitasking entirely. Research suggests that you’ll be more productive if you take mealtime breaks than if you work through them. And you’ll eat and digest better, too.

2. Slow down.

If you’re like most people, in the moments leading up to your meal, you’ve probably been moving at lightning speed, so slowing your pace might take conscious effort at first. That’s OK. Chill. Relax. Tell yourself you are not in a hurry. Put your fork down between bites.

 3. Sit tall and still.

The physical posture you take sends your nervous system (and thus your digestive system) powerful messages. So avoid eating in “Go!” position (upper body hunched forward, head low over your food, the plate just inches from your mouth). Instead, strive to eat in a semiregal yet relaxed “still” position: Butt fully on the chair; both feet flat on the floor; body erect; the back of your tongue and the center of your throat lined up directly above your shoulders. Notice how this creates a nice gravity-driven path for your swallowed food to follow, and how it introduces a sense of calm.

 4. Breathe.

Many people unconsciously hold their breath while eating, and this fuels the body’s stress response. Instead, take some deep breaths before you begin your meal, then continue to breathe deeply through your nose while you chew. Focus on taking three or more slow, deep breaths (in and out) per bite.

 5. Take small bites.

Aim for bites no bigger than the top segment of your thumb. Taking too-huge bites inhibits your chewing and inclines you to swallow larger quantities of food without fully tasting them.

6. Chew.

Chew more than you think you need to. Then keep on chewing until your food is in a smooth, liquid state. You might be amazed how much this improves your digestion and decreases your tendency to overeat.

 7. Enjoy.

Savor the experience of the aroma, appearance, flavor, and texture of your food. Rather than just letting each bite race past your senses in a big blur, reach for subtle flavors. Above all, eat with love and appreciation — for your food, yourself, and your dining companions.

If it helps, keep this list with you, or make a list of your own to review before mealtimes. If you integrate even one of these practices at each meal, you’ll soon notice you’re not only tasting more, and eating more wisely, but you’re experiencing the how of eating in a whole new way.