I love to eat. I love food. I love crunchy food. I love pizza, root beer floats (even though they don't crunch), spicy food, cookies, burritos, pomegranate seeds, Chinese sweet-and-sour chicken, sushi, beer, sweet corn on the cob, medjool dates...I could go on and on. If the food is particularly good, I can easily exceed the natural capacity of my stomach and just keep eating long after I've already become sick. (This took years of practice and frankly, it is a skill I do not recommend you acquire.)
My father often spoke of new eating techniques taught to him by my step mother. These techniques centered around eating slowly. I didn't think much about it at the time, being perfectly happy with how I ate. But it's funny how things your father tells you can take an awfully long time to sink in. Many years after he first shared his new found habits with me, I started to pay attention to how I ate. I put a bite in my mouth and began to chew, and in almost an instant, I swallowed and then quickly moved on to the next forkful. As long as there was an ample supply of food and my stomach hadn't begun to tear along a seam, this worked out great. But then I thought about it and realized that the really good part of eating was tasting the food in my mouth. And when the experience had to end (either because the food had run out, or because of extreme gastric discomfort), it was a real bummer - no more taste in my mouth!
So while eating should have been focused on the tasting phase of the process, instead all I was doing was shoveling food from my plate to my stomach about as fast as I could go, catching only a brief instant of pleasure during mastication before it dropped down the hatch never to be tasted again. This misalignment of process to priorities was particularly troublesome when eating something like chocolate mousse or fresh-baked apple pie...when I wished the eating didn't have to end (and shouldn't have even started in the first place). Not only was my whole process of eating not optimized for my top priority, but I didn't particularly like stuffing my stomach until the onset of pain either.*
Next, I focused on my jaws as they chewed. They were cranking away! Those things can really move! And then it struck me. Why the heck are they in such a hurry? That's when I realized I needed to slow down. Chew slowly. Enjoy the taste. Doing so makes the pleasurable part of the experience last longer (super important when eating chocolate mousse, especially as that stuff doesn't even require chewing!). When I began to practice the art of eating slowly, I found that not only did the pleasure of taste last much longer, but I even tended to stop at a reasonable point, sparing my stomach the pain of a seam-splitting overdose.
Though we religiously (pun intended) enjoy a family meal together every Friday night, most other nights of the week, this is a rare event. Busy schedules that pack activities far into every evening deny us the pleasure of each other's company at the dining room table. As we are all readers in our family, it is typical to bring a book (or electronic device) to the table to keep us company, consuming calories and literature (or the news, or funny cat videos) simultaneously. I have found though, that if you are paying attention to what you are reading (or watching), you aren't paying much attention to what you're eating. That means the food disappears and you've barely noticed it as it slid past your taste buds. Now this might actually be a good idea if the food isn't very good. Fortunately, this is an exceedingly rare event in our house and most times, I would really like to enjoy the taste of what I'm eating. I have found by focusing on my plate of food rather than a book, phone, computer or TV, I get much more enjoyment out of the meal, even if I must be dining alone.
So if you like eating, and especially if you are eating something that you particularly enjoy, I would like to suggest that you close the book and put the smartphone aside. Instead, let the food be your company. Pay attention to it and chew it slowly. Your taste buds, and maybe your stomach, will thank you.
*I am concerned here of course with what I hope for most people are normal eating circumstances - it's meal time and you're perhaps a little hungry. Or maybe not hungry, but presented with an opportunity for recreational consumption. I am not talking about circumstances of malnutrition or, G-d forbid, chronic hunger. Obviously in those cases, the intake and digestion of proper nutrition is paramount!