Can eating at the table help you to lose weight?

Years ago I remember meeting a rather intimidating woman who owned The Golden Door health spa in America during filming for ITV’s This Morning programme. She was emphatic that every meal should be treated as a banquet. ‘Always sit at a table which should be set beautifully. Use pretty dishes to enhance presentation and eat slowly. Enjoy the experience’, she insisted. Of course she was right but busy, everyday life gets in the way and in reality we don’t take our time. And eating in front of the television has become normality.

A recent study has highlighted the fact that if we eat while we are watching television, we will not feel so satisfied, we are more likely to snack later and we will not remember as clearly what we have actually eaten. The study found that women who ate lunch whilst watching TV later snacked on more biscuits than those who had eaten a similar lunch but who had not been watching TV while they ate it. This is an important finding for anyone trying to lose weight.

To lose weight we need to eat fewer calories than our body uses up during each day and we need to try every trick we can learn to help ourselves not fall by the wayside when that first hunger pang hits our stomach. Going for the biscuits is the worst thing we can do. We never eat just one as biscuits seem to set off an immediate craving for another one as soon as we eat the first mouthful! Then we’re tempted to eat the whole packet to get rid of the darn things!

So let’s learn from this study and start planning to eat away from the television and enjoy every mouthful of our food. Food needs to be kept in the right perspective as well as the right quantity and it should be enjoyed. Leaving the table after a meal is a signal that the meal is over and we should try and train our brains to not expect another meal until the appropriate time. The only exception to this is to eat a small ‘power snack’ of perhaps a couple of satsumas or a small pear mid morning and mid afternoon to keep our blood sugar levels up. If you can stick to this habit, it will help you to lose weight and if you increase your activity levels at the same time, you will lose weight significantly faster. If you need help sticking to your diet, visit our website: www.rosemaryconley.com.