Slow Down for Health Sake

Isn’t eating food, just that, eating?  To get to the stage where the food is put on the table requires a lot of planning.  What am I going to have?   Do I have all the ingredients necessary or what do I have to buy at the shops?  Reading food labels and then cooking in a low fat yet tasty way and correct portioning onto the plate.  That’s the end, isn’t it?  No it’s not, we’ve ticked all the boxes up to this stage but so many people fall at the last hurdle - the way we actually eat the food.

We are a 24/7 society with an increasing fast pace of life that has led to our food intake getting swept up in the busyness of our lives.

Do any of these situations sound familiar?

1. Standing at the kitchen bench eating breakfast in the morning whilst getting breakfast for the kids and finishing off their lunch boxes
2. Driving in the afternoon between children’s sporting commitments and eating in the car
3. Busy at work meeting that deadline and eating lunch at the computer or your desk
4. Coming in late from work and having dinner in front of the TV
5. Running late for an appointment, so you hoover your food down

These are just a couple of familiar stories that we hear from our clients.  We need to turn these situations around and reevaluate how we interact with our food and start to eat appropriately.

So what is appropriate eating?

1. Planning what we are going to eat.
Think about your day / week, work out a plan of what happens on a daily basis.  If you know that you are home later on one day, then cook extra the day before and have leftovers rather than grabbing a takeaway or cook up extra meals on the weekend and freeze them.  Or perhaps it’s about having a meal that you can cook in a short period of time eg steak or salmon on the BBQ and a salad.  This doesn’t take long to put together.  It just takes a little bit of forward planning and a small amount of effort.  If you know the night before or the morning of what is for dinner that night, then half the battle is won.

2. Eating slowly
If we eat our food fast, then we don’t get the feeling of fullness in a timely manner which can result in over consuming our portions.  It can take up to 15 – 20 minutes for your body to register fullness so if we eat fast, we don’t get this signal until it’s too late and potentially we may have eaten more than what we require.

3. Eating in the appropriate setting
When we put food onto a plate, sit down at a table and turn off our outside influences (namely the TV), then we can focus on our food.

I remember meal times growing up were such an important time for my family.  We would gather at the table, eat our food and talk about the day, what was going on in our lives and listen to my dad’s bad jokes!  If we didn’t sit up straight, then mum would put a broom down the backs of our shirts to make sure we did sit up straight.  We were taught to not talk when there was food in our mouth and to put our knives and forks together at the end of the meal to signify that we were finished.  I read recently an article about lost etiquette especially in our adolescents – meals consumed in their bedroom or whilst playing games on the computer and even coming to the meal table without a shirt on.   I’m not advocating that we need to go back to the good old days, but the food we eat and how we eat it seems to have been swept up in our busy lives.

Eating slowly and in the appropriate setting does require a change in our behaviour.  However to be successful in weight loss and weight management, we need to make fundamental changes to how we interact with our food.  Next time you see a wine connoisseur watch how they interact with a glass of wine.  They put the wine up to the light, they swirl it, they talk about the wine’s legs and they smell it and then sip it.  They use their five senses.  So here’s to putting our food on a plate, using our five senses and being mindful of what we’ve eaten, how we’re eating it and enjoying quality time with our family.