Eating more slowly can have a profound effect on losing weight. Dieticians are agreeing that the rate we ingest food has a lot to do with how much we feel we need. Speedy eaters have a tendency to eat bigger meals than slow eaters, according to recent research. If we eat until we’re satisfied, we keep consuming more food when we’re gulping it down than when we take it steadily.

You can personally empirically test this. At dinner tonight, eat as much as you want very quickly. On a different day, enjoy the exact same dinner, but this time spend at least twenty seconds with each forkful in your mouth. The first meal will probably be larger than the second. But the best thing is you’ll feel satisfied for longer after the slower, smaller meal.

The reason we overfill ourselves when eating at a pace is we don’t wait for the digestive process. When the food does then reach the stomach, we get a horrible swollen bloat.

Another reason to take more time to chew food is because the digestive process begins in the mouth. We salivate more when chewing, which promotes effective digestion and dispersal of waste products. This means we retain less fat and carbohydrate in our system.

The way we eat can also be relevant to how much we eat. For optimal digestion, we should sit in a dining chair and eat at the table. Our body is better placed for digestion in this upright position – so combined with a more polite eating pace we naturally stop when we feel satisfied.

Conversation tends to flow more around the dining table, which could also be a reason for slower eating. Either way, dining at the table beats TV dinners on the sofa hands down where digestion is concerned.

It’s also the case that we eat faster if we’ve allowed ourselves to get too hungry. Aim to prevent this by planning meals in advance, and eat smaller meals more frequently. Sweets and chocolate give instant gratification, but the effect doesn’t last. But five or six mini-meals aren’t always possible when we’re at work. That’s when we need to take pieces of fruit, packets of seeds or nuts or perhaps some oatcakes to have throughout the day.

So just to re-cap – the time we take to chew our food now seems to have a direct bearing on the length of time we feel replete. Relishing each mouthful could be a helpful contribution to losing weight.

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