Do you tend to eat your meals too quickly?  I touch on this as a possible contributory reason for obesity in my book, and recent research in Japan would seem to bear this out.

The study, carried out by scientists at Osaka university, looked at the relationship between eating speed, feelings of "fullness" and being overweight.  It found that just under half of the 3,000 volunteers tended to eat quickly. Compared with those who did not eat quickly, fast-eating men were 84% more likely to be overweight, and women were just over twice as likely. Those, who, in addition to wolfing down their meals, tended to eat until they felt full, were more than three times more likely to be overweight.

Why is this? A biological explanation for this is that eating too quickly interferes with a signalling system which tells our brain to stop eating because our stomachs are swelling up. Our stomachs therefore become full before our gastric feedback has a chance to develop so we carry on eating.

Eating quickly has been one of my own bad habits and was, I am sure, partly to blame for the obesity problems I had throughout my life. Like many, rushing my meals was a behaviour I learned in infancy. I had school dinners and there were at least three reasons why it paid to eat fast.  Firstly, those who finished first were the ones who got seconds if there were any going; secondly, getting out of the dining hall quickly meant a better chance of getting play apparatus (in primary school) or grabbing a tennis court during the lunch break in senior years.  And thirdly, since we ate on tables of ten, and could not be dismissed until everyone had finished, it could make you very unpopular to hold others up.

As I reflect on my school eating behaviour I also recall, in the sixth form (when I was no longer motivated to rush out first) that it actually paid to be among the last to be seated.  With a bit of luck you might only have four or five on a table, but would still get given food for ten!  How brill was that!!

My home circumstances reinforced this tendency to eat fast.  I was brought up in a small hotel so meal times were always hectic for the whole family.  We just grabbed food when we could and were often interrupted by guests.  As a teenager I was promoted from washing up to serving tables, but not wanting to hang around a second longer than necessary afterwards before getting to the swimming pool, I would serve the thirty visitors and then rush out to the kitchen and scoff my own meal as quickly as possible in order to get back into the dining room just as those I served first were finishing!

As I have presented the Fit For Life Forever course I have come across all kinds of reasons why people eat quickly:  being one of many siblings all competing for a finite amount of food (stretch or starve syndrome); eating before the food gets cold and rushing food down because the baby is crying and demanding attention.  Often we simply don’t allow ourselves enough time to sit down and enjoy our meals and end up eating on the run.

Do you tend to eat too quickly?  And when you’re the first to finish and others are still happily munching away, what do you do?  Do you have seconds simply because you can’t stand watching others eat without eating yourself? 

It’s interesting to look back on life and see how our bad habits developed.  But the good news is that bad habits are learned behaviour and therefore it is possible, though not necessarily easy, to unlearn them.  Practically we can help ourselves by consciously chewing food for longer or putting our knife and fork down between mouthfuls.  We can seek to order our lives so that we do not have to rush meals; we can draw up boundaries whereby we have ‘me time’ for eating and refuse to let anyone or anything interrupt us.

Next time you sit down to eat and give your customary thanks to God for ‘what you are about to receive’, why not add this to your prayer: ‘ and Lord, please help me to slow down so that I can actually enjoy the food you’ve provided.’  If we have the will, God will show us the way.