I choose to chew and chew and chew and chew...

so slow...webs are forming

One of the ways I am trying to be healthier is by becoming a slow eater. I inhale food. If there was a contest for being the fastest eater, I would win by a landslide. It is going to be a hard habit to break, especially because I am starting off in the negative; my goal was to begin today and I was running so late this morning I had to skip breakfast (even though I pre-sliced all of my English muffins for a faster, more streamlined run around the kitchen) and then I realized at 1:30 p.m. I still hadn't eaten lunch and had an errand to run at 2:00, so you guessed it, I inhaled my salad, cottage cheese, and pineapple in under ten minutes. Ugh. This is going to be really hard. 

Someone I went to dance school with took this to an extreme (not surprising when talking about dancers and diets) and made an effort to chew every bite eighty times. She didn't eat with the rest of us because it took her so long - she ate by herself in the privacy of her dorm room. It honestly did wonders. She lost so much weight her face practically shrunk in half. I am not looking for anything that dramatic, I just want to eat a little less, get more nutrients out of my food, and actually taste my food (novel idea!) instead of mashing it up really quickly and swallowing. I am thinking about trying for a rate of twenty to thirty chews per bite. In researching this notion, I came across an eye-opening article and learned there are multiple benefits to eating slow. Click here to read the article, which is also where the photo above came from.