Summer time is glorious... but also when our bodies get bared and any insecurities about our figures or wellbeing come out to play. Although not a believer in 'diets' or crash detoxing, healthy eating is certainly something worth subscribing to . Here are my top tips for eating well this summer, and for making your relationship with food a more rewarding experience.
Make Food The Focus
Food should be enjoyable, not only sustaining the body and mind but giving pleasure. If eating does not make you feel happy, you may need to take a look at what you are eating, where you are eating, and how you are eating.
Focusing on your food as you are eating it will leave you feeling far more satiated than if you guzzle something at your desk while reading work emails. If you don't pay attention to your meal because you are focusing on something else, appreciation of what you have eaten is diminished and you will be more likely to be left feeling unsatisfied. This leads to looking around for something 'yummy' later in the day. When you eat...you eat. No work, no desk, no phone, no TV. The focus is on the food before you, and the company you keep while you are eating.
Slow down
If you tend to dive in to your meals like a stray dog that has not eaten in a week, then this one is for you. Slow down with your food! It takes approximately 20 minutes for the brain to register satiety. When we eat quickly, we tend to eat a lot more before we realize how satiated we already feel. Take a look around you...the people who eat the fastest are usually the ones who eat the most too.
A good trick for slowing down, (and it also makes for better table manners) is to not touch anything on your plate while you are chewing. Put your cutlery down until everything in your mouth has been swallowed. There should be no cutting, mashing, or preparing the next bite until everything you are currently chewing is down! In addition to aiding digestion, improving table manners and eating less, flavours will be noticed enhancing your pleasure from the meal.
Everything Starts On A Plate
The temptation to pick at food is a common one, but it comes with some problems. If you have not visually seen your entire meal on a plate, you do not know how much you are eating. By 'picking' we often end up consuming far more food than we realize or intend to, because our brains are not quantifying it as we go.
A great rule to try when preparing food is to only sample what you don't know. If you already know the flavour of something or have eaten it before, you do not sample it while cooking. Taste sauces, or flavours you may be combining experimentally. Otherwise, there can be a tendency to nibble on so much while cooking that you will not even be hungry or in need of food by the time you sit down to eat. Nor will you be satisfied, as you will not think you have eaten a meal. Anything you eat goes on a plate first. It will help you to quantify what you put in your mouth.
Colours and Presentation
In a restaurant, when we see food being delivered to other tables, a common reaction is 'oh, that looks good'! Other than smell, sight is the first sensory reaction we have to our meals. It should be an exciting and pleasurable one, and believe it or not, food that you believe looks good, is going to taste better. Heston Blumenthal, the award winning chef of The Fat Duck, says that 'more than we realise, sight is a key part of what makes food delicious. Partly this is the result of learned experience: in the orbitofrontal cortex, the sight of food becomes associated with its taste, odour and texture. But it goes beyond this. Colour, for example, can actually alter our response to an odour directly in the primary olfactory cortex - the part of the brain that processes smell information - thereby changing the way we perceive that odour.'
A variety of colour in meals increases your chances of consuming essential nutrients compared with eating foods that all look the same. Many different vegetables have completely different vitamin and nutrient profiles. If you look at your plate and it doesn't have green, add some; if it only has green and the browns of a meat, try adding some colours (which will result in flavor too!) like tomatoes, capsicum, carrot! Not all your food need look like a rainbow; simplicity can also be wonderful. However if you make sure there are a few different colours on your plate at every meal, you are off to a good start.
Texture is also important. If a salad has green leaves and slices of capsicum or other crunchy vegetables, perhaps slice a few really fresh mushrooms for a change of colour and texture, or add a sprinkling of nuts, some olives, big chunks of cucumber, or something softer like a few pieces of roast vegetable.
Eating well can have a domino affect in your life. Not only will you have more energy, look better and feel fantastic, confidence levels also often increase. Why would you not?