Eat slow

Eating slowly can help bring awareness to your food choices, the quantity of food you are eating and may help you tap into your decisions around that particular meal. Bringing awareness to your nutrition is the first step in improving it. If you eat on autopilot and just get into the habit of what you have always done, making change and progress can seem hard. The first step lies in slowing down your eating and being present with the meal at that moment.

First step: Try to take breaths in between bites, focus on chewing a lot (which helps digestion), and try to really taste each and every bite of food you eat. You are not in the military trying to eat while being shot at, and you are not out in the jungle trying to eat before the lions get to you. Eating a meal should be enjoyable, deliberate, and contribute to improving your health. If you are eating too fast, you may choke, barely taste the food, have way more than you need to feel satisfied, or feel bloated and unwell following the meal.

Second step: Time how long it takes to eat your meal. The goal should be about 20 minutes. If it takes less than 20 minutes to eat your meal, try setting a timer for 10 minutes and make it a goal to ONLY have half of your meal gone in 10 minutes. Space your meal out into 2- 10 minute eating sessions and up to half each 10 minutes. If you consume half your meal in under 10 minutes, don’t eat another bite until the timer hits 10 minutes.

Third step: Remove distractions during mealtime. Put down the phone, turn off the YouTube, turn off the TV, and for heaven’s sake, don’t eat while driving. The goal is to bring your awareness to eating and the foods you eat and how much, if you are distracted during this process it’s going to be very difficult to be present at that meal. Do your absolute best to put down the phone, avoid taking calls or answering texts, check emails, scroll social media and

JUST BE PRESENT WITH YOUR FOOD.

Fourth step: Choose foods that naturally take longer to eat. Foods like fruits, vegetables, meats, beans, nuts, seeds all take longer to eat than their processed counterparts. Most highly processed foods melt/dissolve in your mouth and require very minimal chewing which means you can eat a lot of them in a very short amount of time. By choosing unprocessed foods that require a lot of chewing, you not only get way more nutrition with fewer calories, but you will end up being more satisfied with the meal overall.

Fifth step: Focus on the food. Focus on how the food feels in your mouth, the texture, the flavor, smell, the saltiness or sweetness of it, try to see if you can identify different flavors in each bite. If you are eating with someone, try to have a relaxing conversation with the person, this can help slow down your eating speed as well.

Try these 5 steps to improve your nutrition, digestion, and satisfaction with your meals. You will more than likely end up feeling better about your mealtimes, make better food choices, and maybe even have an easier time controlling your weight.

Shanti Wolfe

Director of Nutrition at Performance EDU Fitness