My mum (and my granny) used to tell my sister and I as children to
chew each mouthful 20 times, slowly, to enjoy the taste of our food.
This
old fashioned idea of eating has a lot in common with the Buddhist
discipline, which encourages eating slowly, and sometimes silently for
health and tranquillity. What my mum (and incidentally Buddhism)
was attempting to do was to break the habit of wolfing down our food.
Instead patiently chew, pause, put down the knife and fork between
mouthfuls, take a sip of water, appreciate the flavours, don’t talk
(with your mouth full) and certainly don’t spoil the ritual of enjoying
food by watching TV at the same time.
Think about the food in your
mouth. Examine the flavours. Feel the textures. If you roll the food
around your mouth you experience each bite more intensely and more
pleasurably.
Welcome to “mindful eating”, the kind that stops you
eating too much, too quickly and consuming too many calories, not giving
your appetite time to switch off.
With the pace of life speeding
up and our speed of eating with it, a nutritionist from Harvard
University is advocating mindful eating as a way of stopping you short,
asking yourself questions like: Why am I eating this? Do I really need
this? Do I feel full yet? Am I eating out of unhappiness? Or because I’m
depressed? Eating thoughtfully means we soon realise we don’t need to
eat so fast or so much, and that we feel fuller sooner. We give our
brains time to tell the stomach we’ve eaten enough.
Source - Daily Mirror
