Tips for Weight Loss

If you are one of the small minority of those of us who have diabetes but have a normal weight, you are excused. You can read my other articles here.

But if you are among the 85 percent of people with diabetes who are overweight, please read on. Please also send me your comments on the successful strategies that you use to lose weight. I want to be able to include your best tips in my forthcoming book.

All my life I’ve been a fast eater. I tell myself that’s because I don’t like my food to cool down too much. I might not walk too fast, but I can usually beat everyone to the finish line of the meal.

It’s important to slow down at the table. The trouble with eating fast is that when we don’t slow down over our food, we can be full before we know it. When we eat fast, we can eat more than we need to satisfy our hunger. Everyone knows that bit of conventional wisdom.

But we didn’t have any proof until October 2006, when researchers at the University of Rhode Island compared how much people ate when they gobbled down their food and when they savored their meal. The researchers, Ana Andrade, Tara Minaker, and Kathleen Melanson, reported their results at the annual meeting of the North American Association for the Study of Obesity.

The people who ate more slowly not only took in fewer calories but also had a greater feeling of satiety when they finished and also an hour later. They even said that they enjoyed the meal more than when they were in the quick eating
group.

I have even heard of an electronic device that counts how rapidly you eat. It has a contact sensor on your plate.

“If the utensil strikes are too rapid, the plate will play fast and aggressive music,” the inventor says. “If the person eats more slowly, the music will be calmer and less stressful.”

But I’ve found that I don’t need to go that high-tech. Some of my best strategies come from Brian Wansink.

Brian taught me that the best way for me to eat slower is to think about my meal as I eat it. In practice what this means is not to think about something else that we are watching on TV, listening to on the radio, or reading in the newspaper. Brian calls that all too common way of consuming our meals “Mindless Eating.”

In that book Brian reports many experiments that his university laboratory conducted showing how we can eat less. Some of my other favorite tips are:

1. People who eat only at the kitchen or dining room table eat less. And this doesn’t mean eating at the kitchen sink.

2. When we eat directly from a package we eat more. Until I read this, I made an exception for eating some of the plain non-fat yogurt that I love. No more.

3. The best part of a dessert is the first two bites. This means that I now buy smaller pieces of fruit than I used to buy.

Then, Brian shows us that size matters in more ways that one. Two of these ways that he taught me are that when we use smaller bowls and smaller spoons we eat less. I eat a lot of stews and soups, but now I use smaller bowls than I did before and teaspoons rather than