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Capla comments on Overpaying for happiness? - Less Wrong Discussion
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How many people here put deliberate effort into tasting their food as they eat it?
Try this.
When you're eating (alone). Take some food on your fork. Take a bite. Put down your fork. Don't pick up your fork until you have finished chewing and swallowed EVERYTHING in your mouth.
Doing this is amazing to me in two respects. 1) The amount of flavor that you become aware of, when you make it your priority is astounding. The pure visceral enjoyment is easily doubled (as best as I can attribute to subjective and unincremented scale). 2) This is really hard. The habitual pressure to start gathering more food before you've finished what's in your mouth is enormous. I sometimes have to force myself to push on the plate with my fork to prevent the thoughtless action.
I am interested to see how others' impressions differ from mine.
My wifes rule for desert: eat have whatever she wants, but only gets five (reasonable size) bites. She tends to eat desert slowly and really savors everything about them, but says that after about the fifth bite she can't taste anything any more anyway.
Would people here be interested in top level posts on this topic, namely techniques for being present, living intentionally, and enjoying stuff?
I started doing something like this when I noticed that I was eating one of my go-to foods (burritos) so perfunctorily that I was barely even bothering to chew, much less to taste. The experience really is quite different. Yes, it takes longer, but the odds are poor that I was going to get more pleasure out of the time difference than I did out of really experiencing the mixture of flavors and textures and temperatures and so on in the food.
I should do this more often with other foods. I love to eat, but I often eat too damn fast to really enjoy it.
Sounds nice, but I'm afraid I would be eating all day if I would eat like this. And maybe even starve, still.
If the point is to get more enjoyment cheaply, for me this will turn out too expensive. I'm looking for ways to spend less time on eating, as it is. I'm pondering whether Soylent/Joylent/Abbott Ensure or other synthetic food as replacement for some of the meals will make my diet both healthier and faster.
I have found that humans generally eat way more than they need to, and that eating less causes me to have more energy. If you were practicing "focused eating" for every meal, I think you'd probably notice that you're full sooner and eat less.
The only exception I can think of, if if you're doing heavy strength training, in which case you'll be ravenous.
Disclaimer: I have no idea how generalizable my experience is. Your metabolism may differ significantly form mine.
This seems to me very unlikely, since deviations of more than few percent from TDEE lead to unmistakably rapid weight gain or loss.
Still, I like the idea of "focused eating" for enjoyment, and plan to try it a few times.
Interestingly, just as I lack the skill of eating slowly, some people seem to lack the skill of eating quickly. This skill isn't as useful for hedonic purposes, but does have some practical applications.
My metabolism is not necessarily that different, but my rate of eating is. For whatever reason, I eat slowly; probably in 10% slowest eating humans. At one point, having a lunch break on my job, I was choosing a lunch on the basis of which food I could eat the fastest, so that I can manage to eat my lunch on time (mostly porridge, which is healthy, I guess).
Intriguing. Do you think while you eat?
Yes, I do think while I eat. Do you think it hurts?
No. I'm just wondering if paying attention to your eating (instead of your thinking), might cause you to eat faster.