Tongue scraping is one of the easiest things to incorporate into your morning routine, and I believe that once you do it, you won’t want to go back based on what comes off your tongue!!
Tongue scraping is simply scraping your tongue to remove anything that has accumulated there overnight.
It is a fast and easy way to remove extra particles, you know the ones you would think of like, “Ooh, they cause bad breath”. This may be one of the reasons why you might want to scrape your tongue, but it provides way more benefits than just that!
The process is usually done with a small rounded tool that’s made of plastic or metal.
Keep in mind that this is not a replacement for brushing your teeth! It’s a really great addition to obviously brushing your teeth and even using mouthwash.
Here are the three reasons why this has to be part of your morning routine:
1. Improved overall health via improved digestion.
If your tongue is coated, then it cannot signal the right digestive enzymes to properly digest food. Ayurveda uses tongue diagnosis as a window into the rest of your body’s internal organs and how they are functioning.
When we eat and start to chew food, digestion begins then our saliva increases the number of digestive enzymes released.
Having this extra coating on your tongue impedes digestion. As a result, removing that from our tongue can greatly aid digestion, which we all know is critical to overall health.
2. Improved sense of taste
Whenever we want to feel satisfied when we eat, part of that satisfaction comes from the taste of the food. And it stands to reason that if we could better taste our food, we would be more satisfied.
Tongue scraping improves our sense of taste by removing that layer of film, which could be bacteria or dead skin cells. Once removed, our tongue may be able to better distinguish between bitter, sweet, salty, and sour flavors. This definitely part of the digestive process and it allows us to savor our food more.
In Ayurvedic medicine, which is a kind of Chinese medicine, they believe that different parts of the tongue link to different organs, like the lungs, stomach, heart, spleen, liver, and kidneys.
So, removing these particles with a tongue scraper stimulates those organs, but it can also help us digest our food better, which in turn helps these organs work better.
3. Improved oral health & daily detox
Again, this is not a replacement for brushing your teeth. However, it is a really great addition to your morning oral routine that can help tremendously with decreasing bad breath since you’re getting all of the bacteria out that has been sitting on your tongue all night. So you want to make certain that you get that off, which is critical.
A tongue scraper removes the toxins from your tongue while also stimulating, massaging, and cleaning the deep body tissues and associated organs. Thus increasing daily detoxification!
You obviously want to know how to do it properly after learning what it is and why you should do it.
When scraping your tongue, it’s critical to use the proper tool. This is my favorite tongue scraper and it’s inexpensive- which is a win!
How to do it:
- Stand in front of a mirror
- Open your mouth,
- Stick out your tongue.
- Use the rounded part gently to get as far back as you can on your tongue and rake forward
- Repeat a couple of times (probably do it three to five strokes down)
- Each time you do it, rinse it under the water to get what you got off of your tongue
- Repeat until you’ve scraped your entire tongue
Sometimes if you’re just starting out, it might be kind of odd to put it way back there and it can cause a little bit of a gag reflex to come up. You just want to make sure and start wherever is best for you.
I promise, once you see what comes out of your tongue, you’ll never go back! This takes less than a minute, but this is a really important process and practice for detox and overall health.
Do you struggle to have the energy you need to do all God has called you to each day? Check out the free PDF resource I put together with 3 steps to support daily detox for better energy that actually gets to the root of the issue when it comes to fatigue!