Slow Down and Lose Weight

Watching me eat used to be like watching a pig at the trough. It wasn’t pretty for the person watching, nor was it particularly enjoyable for me. Whenever someone would point it out, I’d just say, “I’m a Kobayashi,” with my mouth full.

You lose out in so many ways when you eat fast. Although you taste it, you don’t really taste it. I treat my meals as a spiritual experience. I take a bite, think about how lucky I am to be able to enjoy the tasty food in front of me, and I chew it until I can’t chew it anymore, moving the food across my taste buds to get the full flavor, then I swallow. Brief pause, then the next bite, and the same thing.

If I’m eating something that grows from the ground or a tree (i.e. not an animal), I’ll imagine I’m directly absorbing the energy of the sun. I try to separate and take note of each different flavor. I imagine what the morsel looked like right before it was harvested.

If it’s an animal I’m eating, I say aloud, “Thanks for your life Mr. Turkey,” or whatever animal it is. If I’m eating with someone else or within earshot of any human, obviously the thought stays in my brain and doesn’t reach my mouth. It’s already crazy enough that I think it.

With my beverages, I take a sip, tilt my head back, gargle, spit it into my hands, and rub it all over my face. Kidding.

The point is to eat slowly and consciously, enjoying the flavors, enjoying the essence of the food, and being appreciative of the experience.  Make love to your food with your mouth, your tongue, and your mind.

Halfway through each meal, take a little break to relax for a minute, then start again if you’re not satiated. If you are, then keep the rest for a future meal.

You may think I go overboard eating this way, and you’re probably right. You don’t have to go to the extremes I do, although I highly recommend you try it at least once. Just slow down and take each bite deliberately. This is one of the changes I made in my life that helped significantly in going from fat and depressed to fit and happy.

Obviously I also ate the right foods and exercised (to be discussed in future posts), but one of the first steps was just to slow down my eating.

Eating slowly and chewing thoroughly will make it easier for your body to digest the food, and it will help prevent you from overeating. When you eat fast, although you’ve consumed more than enough food to nourish your body, your stomach hasn’t yet had the chance to send the signal to your brain that it’s full, so you keep eating. And eating. When you slow down, you give the brain more time to receive the signal, so if you decide to overeat, at least you know what you’re getting yourself into.

We’ve all felt the lethargy and bloat of eating too much, even though we felt hungry all the way through the meal. You can avoid that unpleasant sensation and the fat that accompanies it by slowing…down.

And that applies to everything in life. There’s so much happiness and pleasure to be enjoyed in the minutia of everyday life, but we’re simply closed off to it because we’re rushing through the day, trying not to be late to the next place we have to be, but would rather not be, our minds filled with past regrets and future stresses.

If we would just slow down and enjoy whatever we’re doing at that moment, life would be a lot better.