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Real Food 101: More Thoughts on Eating Together.
As we said in our last article, we had a lot to talk about on this subject — what eating together and giving time to meals actually means. Why is it so important to make a big effort?
Part of it is what comes when you elevate eating to a more important place, and how giving food a certain level of respect has a way of paying you back with better quality, somehow. It seems strange, but it seems to work. Check out a few more things we thought about.
Portion Control is Easier.
This might not work in a restaurant, where studies have shown that the main way we decide how much to eat is based upon plate size, and how much the restaurant serves us. But at home, when you’re sitting around the table, eating together, excessive eating starts to become a little more difficult.
Hopefully, if you’re trying to pursue a healthy lifestyle, you aren’t going crazy at the dinner table and being conscious of your portions, but hey — it can happen to anyone. However, one of the characteristics of excessive or binge eating seems to be that it often takes place alone. It’s much more typical to hear “I sat in front of the TV and finished an entire canister of Pringles,” than “he went back for 4 helpings, and the rest of us just sat there, shocked.”
When you eat together and prepare food with that intention, you’re putting a structure around your eating — this is what we’re doing, this is how much we’re eating. That little bit of peer/group pressure, often expressed in a joke (“tell me you’re not going back for thirds, now”) is usually all that’s necessary to prevent overeating — and it’s something that just isn’t present when we intentionally eat alone and don’t focus on the food.
It Doesn’t Have to Happen Naturally.
One of the great benefits that we’ve become conscious of is just the time for conversation that the table brings you. And we’ve heard some people say things like “my family doesn’t like being sat down at the table and forced to chat if they don’t feel like it, and I don’t like doing the forcing, either.” And frankly, that makes sense — if your family, however big or small, doesn’t have an established tradition of eating together, the few times you manage to do it will probably seem forced.
But if that’s the case, it’s always good to keep this in mind — sometimes you have to force it. And just because you’ve mandated yourselves to sit down and eat together doesn’t mean conversation won’t start flowing naturally — it just might take some time, or multiple tries, but this benefit ends up enriching the whole experience. When you sit down for a great meal and have an interesting debate or hear/tell a great story, both the food and the story are enhanced. You’re full and sated from a great meal, and you’ve enjoyed the conversation — and now, the two will start to intertwine in your memory, each one subtly enhancing the other.
Taking Time Can Save Time.
A lot of us feel like we never have enough time. And that’s the key word right there — feel. But when you cut corners on something as fundamental as a good meal, enjoyed to its fullest, away from other distractions, you’ll find that the time saved isn’t always worth it.
How so? Picture this — it just seemed like too much fuss to sit down to a meal when there was only an hour to spare, so you didn’t bother. But it meant a big trade-off, as you had to get food on the go, and it wasn’t the kind of food you wanted to eat. Jump forward a bit in time, and you’re coming up on your next workout. Now, instead of feeling good about how you’ve been eating the last few days, the fact that you cut those corners pops up in a little corner of your brain, and you feel you’ve got to make this workout extra long in order to make up for that fast food.
This cycle can keep going and going, and what’s the end result? That neither food nor exercise is still enjoyable. And that’s a shame — while both of them take effort, you can see that the payoffs are spectacular. Absolutely everything we put into this site, and everything our visitors contribute, is living proof of that fact.
But — they only pay off if they’re somehow enjoyable in some way. Yep, even with the hardest, most killer of Zuzana’s workouts — there’s loads of enjoyment there. But your enjoyment will diminish if you keep cutting corners, thinking you need to because there’s never enough time in a day. Once or twice, sure, you’re probably right. But if you find yourself not cooking anything in your kitchen, for days on end, sit down, think about what (if anything), you’re gaining from it, and weigh it against everything you’re losing.
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