Dear Will,
I have no time to eat. No time. Like No.Time.To.Eat! What do I do??
Respectfully,
No Time Is My Present
Dear No Time,
Wouldn’t it be great if we lived in a place where we had 2 1/2; hours to eat our lunch? Wouldn’t it be awesome if our happy world allowed us the freedom to sit down, fluff our napkin, and taste food with our pinky knowingly extended?
However, welcome to Earth. I know there are people on this planet who have that kind of world, but that may not be the place where we live. If not, you have to tuck your pinky back in and manage what it’s like to have less than no time to eat. Negative time.
The first thing to do is to make sure that your schedule doesn’t dictate your eating behaviors. If you don’t, and you find that you have 90 seconds to eat 20 minutes worth of food, you’ll end up gobbling your meal with anaconda bites, unhinging your jaws to inhale the entire carnitas burrito or whatever.
The short term consequence of this behavior is overeating, with too many calories, and therefore something that frustrates your weight loss efforts.
The long term problem with doing your best anaconda impersonation is that it trains your physiology to expect more food more often, leading to more overconsumption more of the time and, ultimately, larger pants.
That’s how this eating behavior can work against you even long after the hoo-ha of your current schedule has finally calmed down for a microsecond.
A solution for you is to plan to be with your food for some time, even if your life is wooshing by like a Class-5 rapids. Untether the pace of your life from the pace of your eating. Just because you’re doing a ton of things at a million miles per hour doesn’t mean you have to eat a ton of things at a million miles per hour.
And when you find yourself in a Negative Time Zone, and you truly have no time to eat, don’t feel like you have to have to have to get it all “over with” in 3 minutes so you can get back to the “important things” in your life … you know, like figuring out why your printer has decided to take a break from printing today!
Just take whatever you’re eating and plan on having it over time. Even if you taste that ham-n-cheese sandwich or leftover lunch morsel for two seconds, and THEN do your emails or whatever, and then taste again, this one behavior will help prevent your inner anaconda from causing you serious long term, larger-pants problems. Seriously.
Making sure that the time it takes you to consume 20 minutes of food actually IS 20 minutes long or longer will help prevent the overconsumption that trains your physiology to crave too many calories too often. This behavioral routine will help, making you less likely to over-consume, and teaching your body the lessons of controlled consumption over time.
