Avoid Distractions While You Eat to Lose Weight
Welcome back and in this post, I want to take a brief look at the way certain distractions while you are eating can actually cause you to gain weight without you realizing.
In fact, this very cool tip will help you to avoid this aspect to eating and help you to maintain a healthy body size, or if you are on a diet, then to lose weight.
One of the major distractions for people while they eat is the television. It boggles the mind just how many people eat while they watch TV. Yet they have no idea that by doing so they are eating more than they really want and setting themselves up for weight gain. Think about it.
Stop Watching TV While You Eat
Do you really need to watch TV while you eat? Is your food so bland and boring you need to fill your head full of whatever mind-numbing dross is being spewed out of the goggle box?
Maybe it is, but if you are serious about controlling your weight, and I'm sure you are or you probably wouldn't be reading this, then you need to pay more attention to what it is you are eating. You might be surprised to find it actually tastes of something.
When I was a kid, my family sat around the dining room table to eat all meals together. The TV was in the other room and we made light conversation over our meal, which was appreciated because our mother had spent a lot of time preparing and cooking it with fresh ingredients.
It tasted good because it was healthy and wholesome home cooked food. We ate fairly slowly and enjoyed our meal times. None of my family were ever overweight!
Today, people grab something quick out of the microwave and go sit down in front of the TV and shovel the food into their mouths often without even realizing they are eating! Where is the enjoyment in that?
Make Friends with Your Food
Well, if you want food to be your friend, and if you want to maintain a healthy weight you ought to make food your bestest friend in the whole wide world, then you are going to have to pay it a whole load more attention.
To do that, you are going to have to eat it in a place where there is no TV, no newspapers, no books or magazines either. Don't do crosswords, play computer games on portable consoles, fiddle with your cell phone setting or for that matter don't even take or make a call!
You want to eat your meal without any distractions so that you can place your full and undivided attention onto the food you are eating. Why would you want to do that?
You want to eat with all your concentration placed on your food because you want to make your brain aware that your stomach is full before it gets overfull. That happens when you are not paying attention to what you are eating.
Eat Slowly
Also, you want to take time over each mouthful so that the flavors of the food are registered by your taste buds on your tongue. Then those flavors are sent to your brain for processing and directing your digestive system to make a more efficient job of processing that mouthful of food.
When you eat slowly and fully digest your food, less of it gets stored as fat.
Another distraction you can really do without is fast, uptempo music. It has been scientifically proved in tests that when you eat while listening to music with a beat of above 125 beats to the minute, you eat faster. This is no joke and serious business for fast food restaurants.
Fast Food, Fast Music, Fast Eating
Their owners are fully aware of this fact and that is why you get the background music playing in fast food hamburger restaurants and the like and it always has a pretty fast, uptempo beat. The volume doesn't have to be loud.
In fact the quieter it is, the better because you are almost blissfully unaware that it is even there most of the time. It's a very clever tactic that you should take note of next time you visit one of those places.
...Oh... hang on. You are trying to lose weight and planning a visit to a fast food restaurant?
Are you kidding me?
OK, joking aside, fast paced music is a seriously effective way to get the restaurant patrons eating faster, finished and out the door to make way for more customers.
On the flip side, you can have slow tempo music playing as long as it is unobtrusive, because... yes you guessed it, music with a very slow beat can actually help you eat slower. Just don't put on a piece of music that you will give all your attention to, because you have to be focused only on your food. Remember?
So by avoiding distractions while you eat, you give yourself a better chance to lose weight simply by eating more slowly and digesting that food more efficiently. This is nothing exceptionally complex to understand either.
Just be sensible and you can turn your meal times into weight loss diet times, while you eat. Just eat something healthy, and eat attentively to get the most from what you're eating, OK!
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Posted on Mon, 12 Jul 2010 in Weight Loss Tips | 1 Comments
1 thoughts on "Avoid Distractions While You Eat to Lose Weight"
Brendan says:
I guess I'm guilty of watching TV while I eat and your right about eating more than you need when you do that. I don't know exactly when it happened but I used to always eat at the table in our dining room away from the TV, but for some reason started taking my food into the lounge and eating on my lap while I watched TV. You know, it must have been around then I started gaining weight. I guess I started to eat faster and then often would go back for more right away.
I read your post and it hit me like a shovel -- I've been eating too much and not doing anything about it. Starting today, no more TV while I eat! Thanks for the advice.
Brendan