You’ve finished cooking dinner and you can’t wait to wolf it down. After you sit down in your living room, what’s the first thing you do? Odds are the answer is flip through the channels or YouTube for something to watch. At the very least your phone is adjacent to the plate on the table. So you finally find something good to watch and within ten minutes your plate is spotless. What the hell happened? This was your cheat meal too. The meal you’ve been waiting for all week is gone in an instant. It wasn’t even satisfying. So what happens next? You go back in the kitchen and do it all over again.
The purpose of this article is not to explain blood glucose spikes or the effects of sodium and sugar on appetite at a physiological level. Eating while distracted leads to overeating. Overeating leads to binges. Binges lead to anxiety and depression. I’m not going to tell you some hokey bullshit like ‘savor every bite’ or ‘chew each piece 1000 times.’ Nor am I going to convince you that this solution is an easy one because it’s not.
We are bombarded by external stimuli all day and we live in a fast paced world. I know, stop the presses I just blew your mind. But just one time, eat a meal in a silent room with no distractions. No phone, no TV, no internet, not even other people. The first thing you’ll realize: eating is fucking boring! It’s monotonous, which is probably why we look for distractions in the first place. The second thing you’ll realize (which I sort of poked fun at it earlier) is that you really do enjoy and appreciate the meal more. Eat once in silence and when the meal is over I guarantee your first thought will be ‘okay I have other shit to do now’ rather than ‘feed me more.’
Ever hear that multi-tasking is a myth? No matter how many tabs you have open on your browser you can only focus on one at a time. Before you know it, the email in your first tab has been sitting there half written for three hours. Same rules apply here. Ironically, as much as we love eating, the act of eating itself is dull. It’s the reason we eat in group settings at restaurants or family dinner tables, where conversation is our distraction. We eat in front of the TV, we eat at the movies, we eat while we drive, we eat at our desks at work. But we never focus our attention on eating for more than a split second. We do enough to make sure fork meets mouth.
I won’t pretend that eating in quiet solitude will become common practice for anyone. But it’s important to be mindful of the reason certain things happen. At the very least, if you can shift your attention to the meal itself a little more then it’s a win. It’s okay to look down once in awhile.