My Best Weight Loss Tip: Eat Slower

This is one of the best weight loss tips I’ve ever used. It will boost your weight loss motivation, make you eat less and enjoy food more: eat slower.
Ideally your meal should last 30 minutes, from when you start chewing the first morsel of food to when you’ve just swallowed the last one. To achieve that, the trick is to chew slower.

A recent research carried out at the Laiko General Hospital in Athens, showed that how fast or slow we eat the same amount of food, can cause different reactions in our body. The research analyzed the levels of glucose, insulin, fats, and two hormones (which transmit the sense of satiety) in the blood of two types of subjects. Both groups ate a hefty quantity of ice cream, the first in few minutes, and the other as slow as possible, with 30 minutes as maximum time allowed. Results showed that the level of the two satiety hormones were much lower in those who had eaten fast.

In layman terms, if you eat too fast you won’t give your body and mind enough time to receive the “I have eaten, the sense of hunger should stop now” signal, and as a result you will eat more than you need because you will still be hungry. And eventually you will feel too full, instead of satisfied.
This weight-loss tip seems easy to put into practice, but it can be tricky. If you already have this habit, you’re lucky, if you don’t, it may take some time and effort. Especially when they are hungry, it’s very hard for some people not to inhale food. Yet, if we think of it, it is an irrational behavior, unless you have reasons to believe that someone around you may actually run away with your meal (hopefully for you, a very unlikely possibility), or you really have little time to eat at all.

Chewing slower is not an unattainable habit to get into, yet it can be hard enough to be worth including in a New Year’s resolution list. This is why this technique needs tp to be supported by two more weight loss tips:

• Start your meal with a green salad or vegetables. It’s a hypocaloric food which you are allowed to eat fast if you want. If you choose cooked vegetables, don’t cook them too much, as a more solid texture will force you to chew more and slow down the rhythm.
• I found that if I do something else while eating (for example working at the computer) I will be forced to eat slower. Please be aware though, that this should be only a temporary measure, as eating and doing something else is generally not a good thing. There’s no point in trading a bad habit with a new bad one.

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