How To Savor Your Food

Enjoy every spoonful before shoveling more food into your mouth.

I used to constantly shovel food into my mouth, spoonful after spoonful, well before actually completing all the chewing or swallowing of the previous spoonful.  So you may notice you do too, especially when you’re hungry.  Learn to be aware of this!  I mean, it sounds SO basic, right?  I’m basically telling you to chew your food and swallow it before you put more food in your mouth.  That’s very simple and a “No Duh!” type thing when you read it now, but I bet you do it especially when you are hungry.

Slow things down.

Have you ever timed how long it takes to eat a full meal?  It takes 5 minutes or less to eat a full meal if you’re eating like most people.  If you slow things down, it still only takes about 10 minutes, but that’s double the enjoyment!  We tend to just attack the food.  What’s the rush?   Take it easy. Enjoy. There’s no lack of food.  (And if there is a lack, all the more reason to savor it, RIGHT?)

Use a smaller spoon. You don’t need a tablespoon of food unless it’s soup.

What’s the difference between a sliver of ice cream in your mouth or a heaping tablespoon of it?  Both have the same amount of delicious flavor but the big heaping spoon of it has 20 times the calories for no god damned reason!  It is wasteful.

Ration your food.

Sometimes, we might not even put the food into our own personal bowl.  Like have you ever eaten ice cream straight from the container?  Sure you have!  You could inadvertently eat SO MUCH ice cream if you do that.  Always take the moment to ration your food and put it in a bowl so you know how much you have to eat so you could pace yourself.  Otherwise you know if you eat it straight from the container you’re just going to say, “Okay how about a little bit more” every 30 seconds until next thing you know you’ve had 9 servings of the stuff.

Feel how digestion starts in the mouth

If you keep chewing food in your mouth without swallowing, you could actually feel the digestive juices in your mouth chemically breaking down the food!

Try this: Put a piece of white bread in your mouth.  Chew but DON’T swallow.  After a short time (a few seconds to a minute) you’ll start to note that the bread is not only withering away into liquid but also tasting sweeter.

Why is this happening? When you chew, you are mechanically breaking down the food.  But there’s also saliva flowing into your mouth.  Within the saliva is an enzyme called amylase which breaks down complex sugars (starch) into simpler sugars (glucose, maltose, etc).  Foods like bread, rice and potatoes are foods that are mostly made of starch. Starch is basically a bunch of glucose molecules snapped together and it’s how plants store sugar.  Starch doesn’t taste very sweet but glucose and maltose do!  So as you chew the bread you can actually taste this happening!  When you TASTE something, what you are tasting is the actual chemical composition of the food.

Why am I telling you all this?  I just want you to become more aware of this thing called food which you eat everyday. It’s kind of important.  It’s what binds us all.  If there’s anything we have in common, it’s that we all gotta eat.

In other words, eat like this baby (minus the spoon feeding).

So to recap…

Chew your food completely. The only place your body can mechanically break it down is in your mouth anyway!  Enjoy the smells and taste of it start to finish before you shovel more food in your mouth.  (And I use the word shovel cause it’s hilarious and not far from the truth for how fast we could eat.  I could also say we inhale the food, because it sure seems that way sometimes.)  Have a great day and enjoy the noms!

Stay tuned for part 2 of this post.  It’ll be about how dieting changed my relationship with food.