How to Eat: 5 Simple Tools to Transform Your Energy, Health, and Body, Part 3

In the first two sections of this article, I discussed The 20-Minute Meal and two tips for implementing it. I promised you five tools total, so let’s get on with learning the final two tips!

Breathe. One of the most overlooked and under-discussed nutrients in our diets is oxygen. It’s almost completely ignored in favor of focusing on protein, carbohydrates, and fats. Oxygen helps the body burn all of those nutrients better because your intestines are better able to absorb nutrients when your blood is rich with oxygen. It actually speeds up your metabolism, like any other fire, requiring fuel and an oxygen supply! This is part of why physical exercise is so important as well; it increases your body’s oxygen intake and can teach your body to burn fat as fuel more efficiently using that oxygen.

Be sure to breathe deeply and slowly during your meal. You can take a complete breath in between each bite, inhaling and exhaling, or you can pair this with putting your fork down and take several full breaths. This pausing also gives you time to savor the aromas and flavors of your food as you’re chewing, and allows you to check in with your appetite, which is our fourth and final tool. (Do I need to mention my two goals from Part 1?)

Honor Fullness. As I mentioned in Part 1, your body’s natural fullness feedback loop between your brain and stomach takes about 15 minutes to activate. If you’re eating your whole meal in less time than that, you run the risk of overeating and then feeling overly full when it does turn on. When you do extend your meal to 20 minutes or longer, you still want to pay attention to the point at which you feel full. It’s okay if this takes less than 20 minutes, but you need to give your body the opportunity to tell you your stomach is full.

In fact, you want to stop eating before you feel full. Stop when you feel satisfied and no longer hungry, which will be around 80% full. Scarfing down a snack (or several) can often leave you feeling hungrier not because you didn’t eat a whole meal’s worth of food, but because your body is seeking the experience of a whole meal. Make sure you’re listening to it and giving it what it wants! As you try the 20-Minute Meal and keep your journal, be sure to note at approximately what point in the meal you feel satiated.

As a bonus for sticking it out through this whole article series, here are two more quick tips!

Honor Hunger. This one is simple. Don’t wait until you’re ravenous to eat. You’re much more likely to wolf down your food, hardly chewing it or tasting it, simply to ease the pangs in your belly. When you start feeling or hearing some rumblings in your tummy, it’s time to start planning to eat, and soon.

Small Bites. Taking big bites would seem to ensure you have more chewing to do before swallowing, but perversely, it seems to encourage not chewing enough before swallowing. This could also be tied to taking bigger bites when we have let ourselves get too hungry before eating. Small bites allow you to chew more thoroughly and require that you take more bites, and thus more time, to finish your food.

You can use these tools alone with the 20-Minute Meal or in different combinations. I encourage you to play with them and to try them separately and together to find out what works best for you and your body. As always, I’d love to hear how they work for you!

We have a fast culture, with everything around us telling us to rush. Insisting on slow food is an easy way to stand up for and to take care of yourself. Saying no to hurrying through your meals creates space for you to say yes to getting back in touch with your body, to deriving more pleasure from your food, and to improving your digestion, energy, and health, along with losing weight and transforming your body. Good luck!