Feed all your senses to keep from stuffing your stomach
Writing for Shape magazine, Dr. Ann Kearney Cook suggests indulging all your senses if you happen to be a person who can't stop thinking about eating and loves too much food. "Food is one of life's great pleasures," she writes, "but if it's your only or most prominent one, it's a sign that something else is missing."I love this idea and can't stop thinking about how I could feed all my senses to keep me from thinking about peanut butter ice cream with whipped cream and a cherry, or salty hot macaroni and cheese, or...or...
Wind chimes? Soft wind chimes and the patter of bedtime rain.
With a toddler in my life, it's loud. So loud I've become ultra-sensitive, wincing or jumping at the glorious crashes and musical sounds he creates (as I write this, a random dropping of an empty beer bottle over and over and over).
I crave soothing sounds: early-morning birds, the shusshing of our locust tree in a strong breeze, the soft squelch of windshield wipers when no one is talking in the car, my son's breathing in his warm crib, a far-off radio in another house. I never before thought of these favorite sounds as something that could satisfy me physically, as food does. But now I'm going to look for these soft sounds whenever Binx calms down or goes to sleep, and I'm going to eat them up.
[Photo by Zing boom.]
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
9-11-2006 @ 2:25PM
Howie Jacobson, PhD said...
Interesting point. I have a different take, perhaps another way of saying the same thing, and perhaps the total opposite:
The reason some of us obsess about food is that we don't pay enough attention to it while we're eating. We eat on the run, in the car, in front of the computer, while reading a newspaper, while having boisterous discussions, etc. We hardly notice that we're eating.
When we slow down and focus on eating mindfully, we actually get to experience the tastes and other sensations that we crave. And there's a lot of good science showing that eating mindfully increases our nutrient absorption.
Marc David, author of The Slow Down Diet, notes that Pavlov's famous dog and bell experiments really showed that digestion (salivation)_begins with thoughts. When we think about food, we begin the digestive process. When we think about everything else while we chow down, we digest suboptimally.
He conjectures that the mechanism whereby our body lets us know that we're full and should stop eating is based largely on pleasure. So when we don't pay attention to our food, we overeat because our pleasure receptors are going, "Where's my joy? Keep sending stuff my way! There's got to be some joy in here somewhere!"
So if you're eating a sandwich in your other hand as you scroll through this post, put it down, take a nice deep breath, and take a small bite of your sandwich. Really pay attention to the flavors and textures.
Oh, and if we all truly pay attention to what we eat while we eat, do you think McDonalds could stay in business? Junk food pushers rely on our self-induced taste anaesthesia to keep us from gagging on their garbage.
Don't believe me? Chew your next Big Mac slowly and mindfully and tell me how it tastes...
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9-13-2006 @ 7:12AM
Stephanie said...
When I'm trying to eat less, I sometimes imagine the food and how it would taste and try to be satisfied with that. (I'm mainly talking ice cream here, not dinner.) Or, as Howie suggests above, I'll eat aboout half of what I ordered but try to really savor the flavor.
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