‘Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.’ Hippocrates
Once we used to say grace and show gratitude for the food we eat, but now we don’t take the time to prepare our food, bless it and eat it.
Now, since the arrival of the fast food: we have fast eat, food on the run, food to go, speed eating, social eating out…you name it! We don’t slow down enough to appreciate and take time with our food.
In fact we have forgotten the purpose of food is to nourish us and give us health and strength, but the way we eat today ‘take-away’ the real meaning of food.
How often do you take time to slow down and appreciate your food?
One of the ways we can slow down is to take time to see our food, relax and see the beauty.
Food appreciation exercise
Food stimulates most of the senses – smell, sight, touch, taste.
Choose a favourite food you like to eat often. Don’t eat it for a week, a month or more. Then next time you eat it, take the time to slow down and appreciate it.
You may smell it before you even see it. Then you see it! The colours! How colourful is your plate? The more colours, the better it is for you. Do you ever feel your food? Take time to feel your food. Before the knife and fork, original man felt his food. He hunted it, cooked it and ate it with his hands.
In some cultures, it is still OK to eat with your hands.
Now take time to put the food in your mouth; take the time to chew and savour the mouth-watering effects. Bliss!
Taking time to appreciation your food more, could be the answer to weight loss.
To enhance this exercise, you could say the words of appreciation out loud about the food: tangy, zesty, sweet, aromatic…and so on.
Maggie liked to eat ice-cream. Even when she could no longer taste it, appreciate it, or get pleasure from it; she still went on eating it and could finish off a family size tub in one sitting. I asked her why and she said she didn’t know why, she ate it because the ice- cream was there.
She was addicted to ice cream.
I gave her a tip – I said instead of eating the ice-cream, try to imagine eating it. It would give you just as much pleasure and fewer calories.
A couple of months later, I saw her and she had lost some weight. She said she had taken my advice and not eaten ice cream for a while – when she went back to treating herself, she found she could not eat a whole tub anymore. She realised it was too sweet and sickening.
Now, if and when Maggie chooses to eat a scoop of ice-cream she may really appreciate the flavour.
Showing your food appreciation is a whole new world waiting to be explored.
This month is juicy July. Take time and let your taste buds feel the joy of food.
©meditate and grow, Zindika, 2018