Food Coma... Saturday, September 6

TODAY'S ENGLISH SLANG OF THE DAY: Food coma

Had a dinner date with a hot married man, MY hot married man.  We like to go on dates.  We may be married but we still like to relive our dating days.  I get dressed up, he opens the car doors for me, and I usually tease him during the date about whether or not he thinks he's going to score a goodnight kiss at the end.  It's all flirtatious jokes and giggles but he knows me too well to get in his "dessert" before the meal and not to expect it after because of my occasional food comas.  Even my main sponsor jokes to me about my food comas.  You see, me going out for a meal at a restaurant is usually followed by me feeling sluggish and lazy after and wanting to nap -- I slip into a food coma.  

I eat about 5-6 meals a day, depending on the day, what time I wake up and go to sleep, and my training schedule.  So what is an average sized meal for the average person who eats 3 meals a day may actually be the size of 2 of my meals.  Eating out at a restaurant, though my food pickings are clean, usually means I eat more than accustomed to, hence the food coma.  Snickers thinks it's me just being lazy for the sake of being lazy and milking him for a free massage (to which he almost always falls for and I get) but I really do feel so different after a meal out.  I decided today to look it up on the web, to search it out, and to see if there was any kind of fact to my food coma or if it was all just in my head.

My so-called "food coma" is medically known as postprandial somnolence or postprandial drowsiness.  According to Jaclyn London, M.S., R.D., a senior clinical dietitian at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York, "that foggy feeling, the food coma, occurs when you consuming too many simple carbohydrates. Usually when you eat a meal, two types of amino acids—tryptophan (TRP) and large neutral amino acids (LNAA)—are both taken up into the brain. But the insulin secreted when you consume a carb-rich meal stimulates the uptake of LNAA into skeletal muscles instead. So since tryptophan no longer has any competition for uptake in the brain, your noggin becomes flooded with too much of the amino acid and eventually converts it to serotonin and then melatonin—and that’s when you get the sleepy feeling of a food coma."

So there is an actual medical term for it but try explaining that to a man who still is trying to wrap his head around yesterday's "diarrhoea of the mouth" slang,.. hahaha.

In other news, what is it called when you eat too much peanut butter and/or eat it too fast and get that throat-is-butter-jammed-up feeling?  I know there got to be some kind of slang term for that.