At A Snail's Pace

Recently I have been trying to figure out what my emotional triggers for binge eating are and I can say with some certainty that I still have little idea.  Admittedly, I've been thinking about it less frequently than I had been when I first started my blog and I should get back to working on that.

However, I have identified some physical triggers and one of them had been eating too quickly.  I use to scarf my food down like it was some sort of race as to how quickly I could eat everything on my plate.  When it was gone, I would go back for more, because in the five minutes it took me to eat my brain would still think it was hungry because it still hadn't registered that the stomach was full.  So I could get seconds and eat a whole additional second plateful of food and by the time it starts registering that I've had enough, my stomach actually hurts because I've eaten far more than I need to.

This is the cycle that always happening, but I never caught on to what was occurring.  It was only after starting my therapy and my visits to the dietitian that I started hearing about the importance of eating slowly and chewing thoroughly.  I felt embarrassed, and I told my dietitian this, because it sounded like something that I probably should have known but she said that it's something that people don't automatically realize when they're relearning how to eat properly.

I did feel a bit better hearing that it was more common than I thought and started putting it into practice immediately.  It actually was harder than it sounds when you've spent your entire life eating really fast, but it's been about a month now that I've been doing it successfully.  Now I don't even have to think about it.  It takes me about a half an hour to eat dinner, I'm full before I finish eating, I eat less and I never go back for seconds.  All of these things I'm happy about.

Some practices that helped me during that month were setting my fork down between bites, and I still do that actually because it's become a habit.  I chew much more slowly and thoroughly.  I did use to have to think about it before, because it had always been food was swallowed barely after being chewed as if I were some sort of wild animal.  One more thing I found helpful was to stop trying to put as much food on the fork as possible.  For some reason I would always try to stuff as much into my mouth as it could hold.  I am not a chipmunk.

Now, I don't even think about it when it comes to meals and today I realized that I don't even stress out anymore when I'm eating.  That made me really happy and I hope that it continues to stay that way.