Sometimes I catch myself eating too fast and not feeling my best afterwards. I believe a lot of people have this problem. In our stressful times, we of often don’t have the time to spend a lot of time on eating or we just don’t appreciate the food we have enough to take our time to fully and slowly enjoy it as it is available all the time.

We all know that it is pretty unhealthy to eat very quickly though. First of all, the feeling of satiety usually just kicks in after 15-20 minutes so that we tend to eat more than we really need in that moment because we don’t feel that we’ve already had enough and after we finished eating, we might feel stuffed and bloated because of this. Second, our digestive system gets overwhelmed because it suddenly gets so much food in a short time which can lead to digestive issues.

I found a few tricks for me to eat slower that I want to share with you:

I’m not really talented when it comes to eating with chopsticks but that’s actually a good thing. I sometimes eat with chopsticks, not just Asian food but all kinds of food, which is pretty difficult for me so that it takes me a lot longer to get something into my mouth.

A lot of people say that you should sit down at a table without your computer, radio, book or whatever and just concentrate on the food to eat more consciously. While this may work for some people, I know it doesn’t for me. First of all, I find it to be a little sad and boring to just sit down alone in the silence and just eat (it’s something different when you eat together with other people of course). I can enjoy my food a lot more if I watch a video, listen to a podcast or read a book while eating. It also makes me eat slower because I can just take a break from eating to eat slower but within that break still have some entertainment. ometimes I also pick up my phone so that I need to take a break as I have no free hand to eat anymore. During that break my body has time to tell me if I still want something or not. When I sit on a table with nothing but my food.. why would I take a break? I personally would just eat, eat, eat to finally be able to leave that place and do something else. But this is just me. As I said, everyone is different and I know that for some people it’s the other way round: They tend to eat a lot more and a lot more unhealthy stuff when they do something else while eating because they become so unconscious.

Most of the time I prepare myself a good tasting and appealing meal. Especially when eating alone, a lot of people don’t see a reason for making a good meal which I think is pretty sad. Don’t you think that you deserve a nice meal even when noone else is around? I love treating myself with good food and don’t see why I need someone else’s company for this. Especially since I’m nowadays taking photos of my food for Instagram, I put a lot more effort into making it look good which also makes me appreciate my meals a lot more. When you put so much time into making your food look pretty, it would be a shame to just shovel it down your throat in 5 minutes, wouldn’t it?

I try to remind myself of how blessed I am to have access to food whenever I’m hungry. This automatically makes me eat slower and try to enjoy the taste of the food as much as possible as I know that other people would give anything for being in this situation so that it feels kind of disrespectful to not enoy your food to the fullest.

Last but not least, it helps me to have really hot food. When my food is very hot I can’t eat fast unless I want to burn my tongue.. which already happened to me quite a lot of times because I was impatient, not gonna lie here. It especially works very well when you eat your food out of a bowl as it doesn’t cool down as quickly as on a plate.