If you live in a big city or have a busy routine, it’s common to find yourself in a rush, anxiousness, and timelessness. Having a busy routine can lead you to treat your primary needs as secondary and time-consuming baggage, such as sleep, eating and resting. Trying to spare time for multiple roles, such as a successful business person, a mom/dad, a partner, someone with hobbies, a friend and more, the first things we cut the time from are, unfortunately, usually the most crucial ones.
As complex as our lives get and as far we are driven away from our actual natural way of living as developed animals, we more and more fail to cope with the demands of modern life and eating too fast is one of the most important outcomes. But of course, we cannot explain this difficulty of coping with our lives and neglecting our vital needs as it is solely about time management. Our daily mood, relationship with food, and emotional and mental state can highly affect our eating behaviour.
Causes of Eating Fast
1. Being in a Rush
This is probably the most innocent and reasonable reason for eating fast. Simply, if you are short of time – it is highly likely that you will try to fit your meals or snacks in between tasks and places to be – causing you to eat while driving, getting ready or walking.
You scarf down food during a rush, it can cause picking easily accessible fast foods or processed/packaged snacks, and it makes portion control and mindful eating impossible.
2. Your Primal Hunger Kicked In
If you have waited for long hours before eating or skipped your usual meal time, it is possible that you feel the urge to eat fast and more. Even though this can be considered as a normal reaction, remember that to eat quickly on an empty stomach can cause more inflammation and irritation. Eating fast can cause feeling hungry after eating, too.
3. Psychological Factors
4. Emotional Factors
Emotions can significantly impact your eating behaviours through emotional eating, hormonal responses, self-perception, motivation and lack of awareness.
If you feel shame around food, meaning that you tend to eat faster and more when no one is watching, and if this shame-eating starts when you feel uncomfortable, such as loneliness, anger, or stress, you are probably experiencing emotional eating.
The use of food as a tool of confrontation rather than a source of physical nourishment can lead to emotional eating. Emotional eating can both lead to eating disorders and weight gain and also avoid truly solving your emotional shifts.
Health Consequences of Eating Fast
Benefits of Eating Slower
By stopping the habit of quick eating and starting chewing slower, applying mindful eating techniques and avoiding distractions during eating times, it is possible to have control over your portions and food choices.
1. Improved Digestion
2. Weight Loss and Management
How to Eat Slower
Practical Tips and Strategies
First, you should treat eating times as eating times and avoid eating without sitting. Using utensils will slow down your eating. In between every few bites, put the fork or spoon down and pause for a short moment. You may also push the plate away, let your digestive system work, and then take the plate back. If you like snacking, you can set a time limit for the snack time. For example, if you decide 15 minutes is the best, avoid finishing your snack after 15 minutes.
Mindfulness Techniques
Portion Control and Meal Planning
Many of us experience weight gain or no loss while on a diet of only healthy food options. But we should remember that labels such as low fat, diet, healthy and organic do not make any food zero calorie. Some healthy, natural food sources such as nuts, fruit, and whole grains can contain high calories in small portions.
Weight gain is inevitable if you skip portion control and chew fast on high-calorie healthy snacks all day. Therefore, portion control and planning meals and snacks by calculating the macros and calories are necessary. Knowing how much you can eat will automatically slow down because you will not want to run out of food in seconds.
