Shall I tell you who should get the award for the most annoying people on the planet? I mean more annoying than the people who sleep outside the Apple store to get their hands on the newest iPhone? More annoying even than the people who punch each other over old televisions on Black Friday? (Actually, no, they win, they are the most annoying people in the world. In fact, just writing that has seriously got my hackles up. These people are insane!)
Okay, let me rephrase, you know who is in the top three most annoying groups of people on the planet?
Slow eaters.
People who spend three minutes chewing each and every fucking morsel while deliberately and slowly putting their goddamn knife and fork down between each mouthful, carefully crossing them on their plate in front of them each time. AAARRRGGGHHH! I’m getting wound up again. Somebody pass me the vodka, let’s do some left-nostril breathing, Kundalini yoga, heeeeelp me!!
The reason it annoys me so much, even more than when I accidentally bang my head on the bit of wood that juts out over the top of my bed, is because it’s so affected. It looks so deliberate, and the effort looks so concerted, it brings an air of absolute inauthenticity to proceedings. It just looks so forced.
If we’re hungry, as human beings, then we want to pour our food down our throats as quickly as possible. If we’re really hungry we barely bother with the fork, we just breathe in whatever we’ve managed to lay our hands on. Stopping short of tripe, of course. This means that these slow eaters are just deliberately and boringly overriding mother nature then by forcing their own pissy will to eat slow over the top of their natural inclinations. And that gets my goat.
However, I have to concede you don’t see many slow eaters with a belly on them. They tend to be on the slimmer side, after all, if a slow eater was to consume a family feast it would take them most of the afternoon. So despite the fact it’s more irritating than slamming my finger in a sliding door which then takes 6 weeks to stop being painful, eating slowly is the first of the stupidly simple ideas that will jimmy up your weight-loss, as it did with mine. The formula is: eat 20% slower = consume 20% less.
Now we move onto idea #2. This one is very effective because this little beauty prevents that horrible feeling of compulsive desire, that tension, from creeping on during your mealtime and hovering over you while you eat. The feeling that says, “I’m not full yet, eat more, there’s room for more, have more.” It’s especially prevalent if you’re eating any of the white goods like bread, rice, pasta or potatoes and it means that, if you haven’t spotted it or know what it means, you end up eating more than your body actually needs. I compare appetite to a drawbridge. The white goods prevent the drawbridge from coming up so you keep spooning in the grub without really knowing why.
Enter slutty veg. My #1 trick for giving the feeling of compulsive desire – the finger. See, it might come on while you are tucking into fajitas but when you’re devouring a plate of carrots, not so much. Veg brings up the drawbridge and stops you wanting to carry on eating. Life’s too short for a boiled carrot though, obviously, but roasted carrots in olive oil and a touch of salt or honey-glazed carrots? Or carrots smothered in orange-infused butter? Now we’re talking.
Slut up your veg and include a big helping with every meal, fill up on those and be modest with the rest of the meal. You still get to enjoy the fajitas and you still get to eat until you’re genuinely sated, but not in a way that means you’ve gone and eaten 5 fajitas and now have big gluten farts bubbling up inside you.
Moving on now to idea #3. There is a state of mind I get into as often as I can, but certainly before every meal, and it’s had the single most profound effect on my whole life than anything else, ever. I take a moment to deep breathe and step into the perception that the experience of the present moment, “the now”, is coming from inside me. I’m not tasting the risotto, I’m tasting my thought. I’m not smelling the roast potatoes, I’m smelling my thought, I’m not eating the burger, I’m eating my thought. The experience of all food is self-created, and thought informs our senses. Meaning, when I eat (or do anything in fact but for now let’s keep things simple) I’m not experiencing the food directly. I can’t, in fact, I’m only experiencing my thought that’s between me and the food. As such the food has no power over me. It cannot make me want it or not want it, it can’t do anything to me.
Knowing this and perceiving this to be true as I go into every meal means that it’s impossible to overeat because the activity of that is now futile. You only overeat when you feel powerless to do otherwise, but if you recognise you are the one with all the power, you are the one with all the cards, you can no longer act like a victim, and overeating ends.
Simple ideas but mighty, for sure, and if you give them more than a cursory glance you will see that in a couple of months time you’ll be an entirely different being (and dress size). If you brush over them however and carry on as you are now, nothing’s going to change.
If you want the future to be different to how life is now, you have to DO things differently now, which means you have to think differently now, which means you have to perceive how the now is created differently, which means you have to first realise there IS a different way to perceive the now.
And I promise you that once you do? Once you see that you always have a choice as to how you’re going to perceive the now, the only option you will finally start to choose?
Is the one that’s going to make the now worth choosing.
Photo by Sergio Rodriguez – Portugues del Olmo on Unsplash