Are you a fast eater? Or, are you a slow eater?
If you are a fast eater, you often sit and wait playing with your smartphone while your friends or family members finish their meals, and sometimes you are tortured by their slow eating when you want to be polite by not leaving the dining table before they finish their meals. Here “being tortured” is not at all an exaggeration if you are truely a fast eater. You almost want to open their mouths with your both hands and shovel the food in.
I am a fast eater, too. Maybe, I’m a double-fast eater. My mom says that I have always been like that. When I was a baby, I used to eat formula so fast that sometimes it went down the wrong pipe, and I choked on it. When I became a teengager, my habit of eating fast became even more entrenched in my behavior patterns and well developed.
I have three sieblings. We — the four young and active children with insatiable appetites — became very competitive in eating because the first fancy and delicious dishes on the dining table were gone in the blink of an eye. Naturally, the dining table was just like a silent battlefield — although no one called it that.
As I have grown up, I am always eating in a hurry, even when I don’t have to be. I quickly shovel cereal down for breakfast, gobble lunch down while working, and don’t mind eating a quick snack over the kitchen sink to forgo taking the time to sit down at the dining table. I love Korean Pancakes. Whenever I make them, I eat half of them while I am cooking, burning my tongue, and only what’s left is served to everyone else.
All my life, I have been told that fast eating might put my health at risk, resulting in things such as overeating, diabetes, gastritis, or choking.
A while ago, I experimented with a few ways to eat slowly. Here, I am going to share what I learned from my experiments.
The first way that I used to slow down my eating was to count how many times I chewed on a bite of food. I read somewhere that people should chew one bite of food at least twenty times. So, I tried it. However, after only four or five chews, I swallowed my food. I tried very hard to keep it longer in my mouth, but I failed each time. Even now, I cannot imagine chewing anything twenty times without swallowing it, unless I become a cow that chews all day long; chew, swallow, bring up, and chew again.
Another way I used to slow down my eating was to use extra thin and small chopsticks (like this!)
No spoon allowed. I used these chopsticks for every dish: rice, salad, meat, kimchi, stir-fried beans and small tofu pieces in soup. At first, it seemed that the method worked — at least for the first week or so. However, I soon got used to these thin chopsticks, and I became very skilled at using them. Of course, as for stir-fried beans, I stopped eating them using these chopsticks. Simply put, the beans cannot be picked up by these kinds of chopsticks. Next time, I may try to use only one sharpened chopstick and just stab the beans.
The last way that I used to slow down my eating was to use extra small teaspoons (like this!).
It was able to hold only a small portion each time. It worked — sort of. The downside of this method, though, was that a teaspoon-sized bite was too small to enjoy the flavor of the food. When I was eating with that small spoon, everything tasted like cardboard. Thus, I quickly lost my appetite. And along with that, I quickly lost my temper, too. I easily got angry at my family members during a meal. This was not good for my mental health and people around me. Finally, I decided to stop this small teaspoon method.
Although my three experiments failed, I do not regret my choice of being a happy fast-eater, instead of being an angry slow-eater.
I still want to slow down my eating, though. So, Toastmaster fellows and guests, if you have any good suggestions to slow down eating, would you please share them with me?
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