Tips for Eating

It might sound a little strange to be given tips for eating. After all, everybody has to eat, so what's there to know?

Plenty, if you are determined to lose weight through diet because not all eating is equal. We all know that eating the wrong foods is detrimental to our weight loss diet efforts, but that's not what this article is about.

It is about modifying the way in which you eat to improve the effectiveness of your diet and doing it in the simplest of ways.

Don't Eat So Fast

fast foodWithout realizing it, far too many people eat far too quickly, especially in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

That's partly because of the move towards convenience foods that are by nature fast to prepare and put on the plate, but also partly because of the fast pace of life that people now lead.

Eating your food too quickly, no matter how healthy or not that food may be, causes your digestive system to take short cuts and end up storing more of that food as fat. Now that can happen if you eat a diet with absolutely zero fat in it, so don't think you can avoid it that way.

Most of our food contains sugars (the body processes them from carbohydrates, mostly) which provide us with energy and it is the efficiency with which our digestive system processes those sugars that determines how much or how little fat we will store in our bodies.

Drink Water

Drinking a glass or two of plain water before each meal primes your stomach and aids digestion. It also helps to make you feel fuller more quickly and less likely to overeat at a sitting.

Eating more slowly allows our digestive systems time to process the sugars more completely.

Without going into the boring medical and physiological details, suffice it to say that when you eat more slowly you can lose weight more effectively (depending on what your daily meals are made up of).

Hint: Keep your meals low in carbs with plenty of protein and natural fats (not processed or hydrogenated fats) and you will be giving your body much less raw material to turn into glucose.

So how do you eat more slowly?

How to Eat Slowly

There are several simple tricks you can use to make yourself slow down when it comes to eating. For starters, avoid distractions and don't have any fast music playing even if it's quiet.

Music with a fast, up tempo beat played in the background is used by fast food restaurant owners to fool their covers into eating their meals faster so they will leave sooner and free up their table for the next customers. Yes, its true!

Being distracted by TV, radio, computers, reading a newspaper, magazine or book when eating also tends to make us eat faster. To make the most of your meal, you need to place 100 percent of your attention on what you are eating.

To do that, try actually looking at your food before you start eating and take in every item that is on the plate. Then smell it! Take in the aroma and use that time to enjoy how good it smells.

Then take a forkful and place it in your mouth, chewing slowly and focus on the flavors of that food. Take your time doing that because you want to get as full a sensory picture of that food as you can before swallowing it.

Put your fork down in between mouthfuls! That has the psychological effect of slowing down your eating and introduces a more deliberate approach to your food. You will feel fuller sooner and that can help you to eat less and save on calories.

These simple tips will help you to get the most from your best diet meals and lose weight more effectively in the easiest manner possible.

After all, it only takes a little modification of your eating habits and you could be seeing a much more positive effect on your health and weight loss efforts just by doing these few simple things.