In part two of the ‘food’ session at Smart Busy we talked about how we eat.
The answer is fast.
We shop quickly, we cook quickly and we eat quickly. We’ve lost that love of preparing food and taking time to savour each bite. We treat it as a chore instead of something enjoyable, so we either cook something easy and not necessarily nutritious, or we get a take away meal.
Did you know that it takes 20 minutes for your brain to register that it is full? I can’t remember the last time it took me 20 minutes to eat a meal.
Jane called it ‘autopilot eating’, and I do it with almost every meal. The challenge is to move from eating on autopilot to eating mindfully. We know all about that, right? We take the skills learned from meditating, and use them when we are eating. Savour each bite, notice the texture of the food, and concentrate on the taste.
Enjoy each bite.
We can help ourselves to do this by planning our meals, like I mentioned in the previous post. Planning meals means we will have more time to cook, because we know what we are cooking and the ingredients are already to hand.
Another way to help is to stop preparing food and eating alone. We’ve lost that community around food preparation and consumption. We need to think like little old Italian Nonna’s and gather our family and take pleasure from their enjoyment of the food we have made.
Oh yeah, here’s another horrible fact. Did you know that the average plate size has increased 36% since the 1950’s? People who are looking for an antique dinner setting will often ask the store owner where the dinner plates are, and be surprised when they hold up what was taken as a side plate.
Probably because they didn’t gobble their food and then run off to play video games.
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