Last week, I explained that The Arc Plan Lifestyle was about using our senses to balance our meals. I explained that food needs to be balanced visually. This week, I want to talk about balancing meals using your sense of touch.

Raw food has a different texture from cooked food and different food items have a variety of what I refer to as ‘mouth feel’. If you were to close your eyes when eating, you should be able to detect these differences without much of a problem.

The Arc Plan encourages a mixture of textures. Food generally falls into one of five categories – crunchy, soft, chewy, smooth, and liquidy. For example, raw carrots and nuts are crunchy foods; fish and avocados are soft foods; beef and baguettes are chewy foods; cheese and chocolate are smooth foods; while soup and yoghurt are liquidy foods. A reliance on only one texture in a meal will reduce the variety of nutrients in the diet and will also disrupt the healthy functioning of the digestive tract.

To add a further dimension to your sense of touch, you can experiment by making your meals a mixture of raw and cooked foods and by serving hot and cold dishes. A rough guide to textures in your diet would be to look at what eating utensils you use at the table. A spoon and a cup would suggest liquids, a fork would suggest soft, a knife and fork would suggest chewy, and fingers would suggest crunchy.  When you include at least two different contrasts in mouth feel at each meal, you stimulate your metabolic system more intensely, forcing it to burn up more calories!