Losing Weight and Eating Healthier the Gourmet Way
It’s more than a little bit counter intuitive to think of gourmet dining as a means of reducing our weight and dealing with dietary health issues. We all have images in our minds of enormously obese gourmets. However, the fact of the matter is that many groups of people who eat more gourmet foods along the lines of champagne and caviar than Americans, be they super-attractive celebrities or the French, are considerably slimmer than most of us in our increasingly tubby nation.
Could it be that actually appreciating the food we eat could help us to eat less and lose weight? Certainly, the portions served in many gourmet restaurants, which often look absurdly tiny to abundance loving Americans, are much smaller than what you’ll get at a typical fast food joint or classic diner. The idea is, of course, that you are supposed to eat your food very slowly and savor every bite, not wolf it down in the car like a Big Mac you bought with a dollar off coupon. Certainly, it makes sense not to rush our appreciation of sturgeon caviar costing more than $100.00 an ounce or Kobi beef that was massaged for hours while a Japanese koto player serenaded the cows prior to their meeting with the butcher. (Okay, we made that second part up, but Kobi herds are some seriously pampered cattle.)
Ask any doctor or dietitian, eating more slowly gives your brain and body time to realize you’ve actually consumed enough calories. Indeed, studies have shown that overweight people’s brains sometimes take longer to process that information than thinner folks. So, slowing down and savoring gourmet food is an outstanding way of changing our relationship to how we eat.
In other words, at your next meal, don’t order something you only sort of like and wolf it down. Order a small portion of something you truly love and take the time to savor every bite as if it was the world’s most expensive Kobi beef or osetra caviar. Keep doing it, and we bet you’ll be eating less, losing a bit of weight, feeling better, and loving food more than ever.