5 skills to help you adhere to your nutrition efforts

The world is awash with superfoods and bio-hacks that promise to make results unreasonably easy to attain. This sells, but it’s not accurate or helpful and we would be better served spending our time on doing the simple things better and more consistently.

If you recently vowed to improve your diet then these 5 skills can help you adhere to your efforts.

1. Eat from a plate.

Eating from a plate allows us to interact with our food more intentionally. When we get a wrapped burrito or grab a handful of something as we pass by the kitchen countertop we tend to eat very quickly and unconsciously. Eating from a plate creates an environment whereby we need to slow down and think about what we are doing.

2. Use a knife and fork.

Pair this with eating from a plate for double impact. Eating with a knife and fork imposes a speed limit on how fast we can eat, and encourages us to look at our food. We are more likely to feel satiated when we eat slowly and look at what we are doing.

3. Remove distractions (TV, phone, email, etc).

Perhaps you are sensing a theme here as layering this skill with the first 2 adds even more potency. Multitasking is a skill, and just like any skill, it is best utilized in certain situations. If you are hoping to feel full and to be more satisfied after your meals, curbing hunger, then multitasking is not ideal. Sit at a table not your desk, close your laptop, silence your phone, and pause the TV. Eat with a knife and fork and from a plate.

4. Chew.

Want to appreciate your food and feel fuller? Chew it. Shoveling food into our mouth is a sure fire way to bypass hunger signals and is a strategy used by those trying to gain weight in a dedicated muscle building phase. The inverse is true when trying to increase recognition of the feeling of fullness and satisfaction. Eat deliberately and chew your food. Maybe aim for 10+ chews per bite.

5. Dressings/sauce on the side.

Once you’ve made a cake, you can't separate out the ingredients again. Though we could take things off our plate and interact with them separately, it is unlikely that we will. If your meal comes with a sauce on it, then you are at the mercy of the chef as to how much you get. If your meal comes with bread included, then if it comes on your plate the chances are high you’ll eat it.

Think of the components of your meal like rooms in your house. Each room serves a purpose and you can go to any room at any point, but to do so, you have to make an active choice to go there. Think of interacting with your meal similarly and give yourself the choice of deciding what you want to eat and how.

It’s not always about the food

These 5 small behavior changes can help you slow down and be more intentional with your food choices, allow you to be more in control of the amount of total calories you consume, and to appreciate your meal and satisfy hunger cues strategically.

Do you have other skills you use to help you stick to your diet and nutrition efforts? Reply to this message and let me know.