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  6. Eat everything with chopsticks for a week

  Even if you grew up with chopsticks as your primary utensil, you’ve probably never used them to eat a sandwich or a bag of chips. I once heard a story about a local tech company that asked a bunch of its employees to use chopsticks exclusively for a week as a mindfulness exercise. Although weight loss was not the goal, everyone in the office lost weight and several reported life-changing realizations as a result of the project.

  One person dropped his morning bagel habit when he realized that the chopsticks prevented him from experiencing the part of the ritual that he enjoyed the most. Apparently the taste of the bagel was not as appealing as the act of ripping the doughy bread apart with his hands. Once he realized that actually eating the bagel wasn’t important to him, he decided to give it up.

  7. Take your first bite with your eyes closed

  I once went to a restaurant where the entire dining experience, including being seated at the table, occurred in the pitch dark. The idea was to focus exclusively on the experience of eating, without the distraction of vision. Unfortunately, the food at this restaurant was terrible, and focusing on it only made this point more obvious. But it was a good lesson, and I was certainly not tempted to overeat as a result. Eating all of your meals in the dark or even with your eyes closed is not very practical, but taking the time to taste your first bite with your full attention can help you eat the rest of your meal more mindfully. Focus on all the flavors in your mouth and how they interact as well as the smells and textures. This will help you both appreciate your food and eat more slowly.

  8. Eat with other slow eaters

  We all have an unconscious tendency to imitate people we are near. If you are dining with ferocious eaters, you might find yourself mimicking their bad habit and eating quickly just to keep up. To train yourself to eat slower, try finding slow eaters to influence you instead. If your rapid dining partner happens to be your spouse,* try asking politely if he or she wouldn’t mind enjoying the meal with you by taking it a little slower. I’ve had nothing but positive responses to such requests.

  9. Try to identify every ingredient in your meal

  Trying to taste and identify all the different ingredients in your meal is another great way to focus on the present moment and eat more mindfully. This is particularly fun at restaurants, when you didn’t make the food yourself. Check your answers by conferring with the waitstaff or asking to see the menu again. An added bonus of this technique is it can also help you become more creative in the kitchen.

  10. Use a plate

  It may sound obvious, but eating out of a bag is not a very mindful practice. Get in the habit of placing even small snacks and desserts on a plate before you eat them. This will force you to acknowledge exactly what and how much you will be eating.

  11. Sit at a table

  Once your food is on a plate, you may as well go the extra mile and sit at a table. Sitting at a table to eat tells your brain you are having a meal. If you eat while running errands or standing at a counter, you can quickly lose track of how much you’ve eaten. Even if you’ve eaten a fair amount of food while standing, you may still feel as though you haven’t had a meal and want to eat more later. Formalizing your dining experience can help draw your attention to your food and your eating habits.

  12. Remove distractions

  Put away your phone, turn off the TV, step away from the computer, put down your magazine, hide your kids, hide your wife. If you are doing something else, you are not paying attention to the food you are putting into your mouth. I know you are busy and want to multitask, but resist the urge for fifteen minutes and eat a real meal. I admit I’m bad at this one, but I always eat less if I go off-line while I eat.

  13. Eat in silence

  Although going through an entire meal in pure silence may be a bit much for most of us, designating the first three to five minutes of a meal for quiet and mindful practice can be an effective strategy. Alternately, you can use a single meal each day (like breakfast) to eat without extraneous sounds.

  14. Serve small portions

  A clean plate is an incredibly powerful cue that a meal is finished. For this reason, large portion sizes often lead to overeating simply because of our tendency to eat what is in front of us. Serve yourself smaller portions as a reminder to take your time and savor each bite. Use small plates, so your brain doesn’t perceive the portions as skimpy.

  15. Have a conversation

  You only have one mouth, and if you are using it to talk, it’s really difficult to shove food into it. Though this is the opposite of eating in silence, enjoying a meal with friends and having a great conversation is a fantastic opportunity to slow down your meal. Just remember to chew, so your mindfulness doesn’t get thrown completely out the window.

  16. Don’t eat when you’re starving

  Nothing makes us more likely to eat quickly than being famished. We may try to eat at regular intervals, but sooner or later circumstances get the better of us, and we end up hungrier than we should be. I always carry almonds or other nuts around with me for times like this, and I eat exactly ten nuts to tide me over for an hour or so. After about fifteen or twenty minutes, my hunger subsides enough for me to regain control of my eating speed.

  17. Dim the lights

  Research has shown that people eat more in rooms with brighter lights. Set your dinner mood by dimming the lights or lighting candles. This will induce an inner calmness and make it easier to slow down. On the flip side, be careful when eating under bright fluorescent lights, as they can spur frantic overeating.

  18. Play mellow music

  Slow, mellow music can also help set an appropriate eating pace. Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue is one of my favorite dinner albums. However, this trick only works if the music is truly slower than your natural, silent eating pace. If your music is any faster, you may experience the opposite effect.

  Being mindful of your eating habits is about more than just slowing down. When we’re hungry or even just on autopilot (i.e., most of the time), we have a tendency to think we want foods that are decadent and our eyes tend to be bigger than our stomachs. When you see a kind of food you’ve liked in past, like those amazing bacon- and cheddar-filled potato skins your grandma used to make, it’s easy to focus on how tasty you remember them being and not how horrible you’ll feel if you put down half a dozen of them before your next meeting. Even worse, if you happen to be at the buffet of your hotel and not at grandma’s house, it’s easy to forget that the potato skins you’re gorging yourself on don’t actually even taste that good; they only vaguely remind you of something you once enjoyed. When you’re hungry or blinded by memories, it’s easy to forget health goals and load up on what sounds delicious. So when you are filling up your plate (or ordering something you’ll regret), it’s worth pausing and asking yourself not just how these will taste, but how they’ll make you feel later.

  I’m at the point in my foodist healthstyle where, when I see a cheap, greasy doughnut or bizarrely shiny diner food, I don’t see something tasty that I wish I could eat. I’ve trained myself to see a stomachache, a foggy head, and a big pile of regret. Thanks to this habit alone—thinking about how I’ll feel rather than how the food might taste—eating cheap greasy food isn’t even tempting to me anymore. Of course, good, high-quality food that happens to be rich and heavy is still very tempting. But I know that if food is high quality, I will only feel gross if I eat too much of it, which is true of anything. Small amounts are fine and every bit as rewarding as I expect them to be, and by practicing mindful eating habits I’ve learned to stop when I’ve had enough.

  The difference between the two situations is that I make a value-based decision when I eat high-quality foods, whether they are “healthy” or not, and my choices are never mindless. I am fully aware when I am choosing a food for pleasure at the expense of health, and I make certain that it’s worth it. I minimize the damage by eating slowly and mindfully, appreciating
every last succulent calorie, and am far more satisfied with a few bites than if I ate an entire plate of a less indulgent substitute. For a foodist, making smart food decisions is easy and awesome.

  5 Things to Consider Before Eating Something Naughty

  Sometimes foods are super unhealthy, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t eat them. Life should be awesome, and the purpose of food should be to optimize the quality of yours. Food is delicious, it makes you healthy, and it brings you closer to friends and loved ones. At any given meal, I try my best to maximize each of these goals. And if it falls short in one, I try to make up for it in another.

  Inevitably, there are situations in which the best option is not particularly obvious. For example, how important is it to eat healthy on vacation? Consider dessert. By no stretch of the imagination do we need dessert to live, and if we are being honest with ourselves most of the time we probably shouldn’t eat it. But sometimes (er, often) we want to anyway.

  Ideally, you should get your healthstyle to a place where you can occasionally go a little wild without it significantly impacting your health goals. But getting there takes practice and a healthy dose of self-awareness.

  Here are five questions to help you make the right decision before letting loose.

  1. What else have you eaten today? This week?

  To be able to indulge occasionally, you need to understand what “occasionally” really means. Depending on your body size and activity levels, you can get away with maybe one or two treats a week. If you find yourself giving in once or more a day, it may be time to reevaluate your definition of “special occasion.”

  2. Have you been to the gym?

  Using the gym to justify a bad diet is a losing battle. But if you do eat a few too many quickly digesting calories, it’s much better that they go to fuel your muscles rather than your waistline. I’ve found that some of my best runs at the gym are on birthday-cake days at the lab.

  3. Will you be drinking later?

  Alcohol fuels weight gain in a number of ways. Sugary drinks add hundreds of calories to your day and should be considered an indulgence in their own right. Alcohol also has a way of convincing you to opt for late-night burritos and greasy weekend brunches. If you’re heading out with friends later, you might want to skip the after-dinner cheesecake.

  4. Are you trying to lose weight?

  Believe it or not, asking yourself your health goals before you eat something can really help you make better decisions. I don’t recommend strict diets when trying to improve your healthstyle, but if you still have weight to lose, desserts and heavy meals won’t make your life any easier. If you’d still like to drop some pounds, it pays to be picky with your indulgences.

  5. Is it worth it? Really?

  One of the best things about avoiding diets is you have the freedom to fit your favorite foods into your life. But one of the downsides is that you need to be able to make good choices for yourself, which isn’t always easy. It can be very tempting to consider every cupcake that is brought to the office a special occasion and lose track of the truly valuable indulgences that actually make your life better. Birthdays, anniversaries, and meals at great restaurants are things you will remember for your entire life. Junk food at the office is rarely more than an excuse to avoid work for another half hour. Be honest with yourself about the true value of a food before inviting it into your life.

  Don’t expect to become a more mindful eater overnight. As I mentioned earlier, mindfulness can be very tough to develop and has certainly been one of the most difficult transitions for me personally. If you’re having trouble learning to eat slowly and making more intuitive food decisions, it may help to read about and practice mindfulness outside the food setting, to develop a more mindful life in general. Mindfulness and meditation have been scientifically proven to benefit their practitioners with things like stress reduction, better focus, stronger personal relationships, and greater well-being overall.

  Personally, I’ve found that being more mindful has helped me get more done at work, because I’m able to spend more time writing and reading scientific journals rather than jumping back and forth between e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, and my calendar. As a result, I finish my work faster and have more time to work out, cook, and spend time with my family, and this has dramatically reduced the stress I feel in connection with these things. Though mindfulness and meditation are often associated with Buddhism, mindful practice does not need to be tied to any religion. Think of it more as the gym for your brain.

  THE PSYCHOLOGY OF GOOD TASTE

  If you’ve never tasted a tomato that was so delicious it caused you to abandon a career in neuroscience and launch a food website, I can totally sympathize. I was twenty-six years old before I had my farmers market epiphany and had already lived in the northern California Bay Area (arguably the mecca for local, seasonal food) for nine years. It even took me several years after this experience to truly appreciate that all broccoli and eggplant are not created equal.

  When you’ve spent the majority of your life eating industrial fruits, vegetables, and meats, it’s hard to understand how a crazy foodist like me can get so excited about a salad, since the only ones you’ve ever had could barely be choked down with half a bottle of ranch dressing. There’s even a good chance that you don’t believe your palate can adapt to eating vegetables or unfamiliar foods at this point in your life. Food preferences and picky eating are deeply personal and can be so ingrained into your psyche as to feel nearly impossible to eradicate. But I’ve seen countless people (myself included) overcome even their deepest food aversions by developing a foodist’s mindset.

  Gateway Vegetables

  My Story as a Born-Again Foodist

  Summer Tomato reader Cheryl-Ann Roberge was a lifelong vegetable hater until one fateful afternoon in July. Her story is not unusual, but it is incredibly inspiring. She tells the story best, so I’ll let Cheryl-Ann take it from here.

  BY CHERYL-ANN ROBERGE

  If you had told teenage me that I would one day be a vegetable lover, spice fanatic, and adventurous eater, I would have sent my canned ravioli flying toward your face. My name is Cheryl-Ann Roberge, I reside in Seattle, and I am a born-again foodist. This is my story.

  The 1990s were an underwhelming time in my food life. Eggs were one of the few things I enjoyed eating that didn’t come from a box or can. Even at a young age I tried to pick all of the oregano out of my spaghetti. I hated fruit and veggies. I tolerated apples and canned vegetables when required. At age seventeen, I proudly declared that I would never learn how to cook and that I would live solely on canned ravioli. It was simple: I didn’t like anything that had real flavor.

  Epiphany

  Two years into my “adult life,” I was existing on a steady diet of Easy Mac and cafeteria food. Vegetables were the most difficult for me. But, ironically, veggies were also the key that would open the door to foods I would never have been interested in otherwise.

  I went on about my business of eating meat with noodles or meat with rice or meat with bread, and I was pretty happy with the rotation. I worked in the dorm cafeteria circuit at the university I attended in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I liked telling people I was a lunch lady.

  On a hot July day, my world was changed. A special picnic for new student prospects was being served outdoors, and I was scheduled to work it. The picnic served food much different from the typical cafeteria fare. After the new students had been served, the cafeteria workers were given a break for a meal together. I loaded my plate with a burger and whichever pasta salad I knew I wouldn’t eat much of.

  I made my way to the grill and found it covered with a vegetable medley that I’d never seen served before. I kept walking. Mike, the chef, called me back and stuck veggie-filled tongs toward me.

  “I don’t do veggies, Mike,” I said.

  “These are different,” he explained. He was excited that he’d been allowed to make food he thought tasted good. Mike had once opened his
own restaurant, but failed and ended up as a chef at the cafeteria, where creativity was always superseded by budget. This was his banner day.

  I declined once more before he gave the overhaul speech that broke me down. He lowered juicy, grill-marked asparagus, onion, zucchini, and squash onto my plate as I shot him a look of disinterest. The veggies were cooked very simply, tossed with oil, salt, and pepper and flung onto the grill. I’d never had anything like this before.

  I didn’t come away with a huge affinity for onions that time, but I had my first ever delightful experience with something I’d always found disgusting. I suddenly loved the squash and zucchini and thought asparagus was okay too.

  Mike told me that I’d made his day. I raved for a week. My whole idea of food turned upside down, and it was just the beginning of a ten-year revolution. I’ve since learned to like onions, spinach, fish, shellfish, beets, and strawberries. After discovering sushi, wasabi became my gateway into loving spicy food, which I’d never been able to tolerate.

  My journey hasn’t ended. Last fall I took my first trip to Italy, where I discovered cantaloupe served alongside dinner entrees. I had always been lukewarm about the fruit, but something about having light, juicy melon after a slice of delicious lasagna made me appreciate its sweetness in a way I never had before. Now my least favorite fruit salad element has become a favorite.

  It is difficult to express to you just how surprising and lovely these realizations can be. I live for them, and I try every new food I can. I plea-bargain with other picky eaters I meet. I pester them to try new things. I invite them over for dinner and try to introduce them to something they’d never otherwise try.