I don't know how many other people experience food, but for me it's generally about the texture. As it turns out, eating normally means I only experience the texture of food for a tiny bit in each bite since I eat very fast.
Today I was really tempted to go for a snack, but instead of taking a handful of peanuts as I normally do, I took just 3 nuts. I figured that even an extremely tiny amount would still allows me to experience the texture of eating peanuts, while still not being that much.
As it turns out, it totally worked! Since I wasn't actually hungry I didn't need to feel full, and since all I wanted was to experience the texture again, eating 3 peanuts turned out to be just as good as eating 30. I rolled the peanuts around in my mouth, chewing slowly and carefully as I felt the salt dissolve on my tongue. It was actually pretty interesting to take a full 2 minutes to consume what I'd normally swallow after a few seconds, and by the end of it I was happy both that I'd had fun eating and that I hadn't ruined my meal plan for that day.
I wonder if I could apply this concept to other kinds of food as well. Given that I have a "one snack per day" rule, I wonder if I could increase my satisfaction by turning, say, a 200 calorie granola bar into 3-5 "micro snacks" by only having one bite every few hours throughout the day. That way instead of eating the entire bar in one sitting and then being tempted for more snacks, I simply take one bite to have something in my mouth and then there's more bites still left over for when I get cravings later. It'd be the best of impulse and long-term planning at the same time: I get to satisfy myself now, but it's part of the long term plan to satisfy myself by doing something very small.
In theory, I think this is a great idea. Food doesn't taste better on the 10th bite compared to the first, and if I've gone too long without a texture/flavor, then all I need is just that first bite. Think of it like the culinary equivalent of scratching an itch: instead of enduring it all day, I can do something small to get it out of my system.
I also think the micro-snack idea would allow me to have a greater variety of snacks throughout the day. Instead of just saying "Oh, I had my M&Ms today, I'll have to wait until tomorrow for pretzels.", I can have one micro-snack of 2 M&Ms and another of 2 mini-pretzels. I would get the experiences of eating both without the calories of eating a full serving of either.
Of course, I'd be careful about micro-snacks adding up, so I'll either try to keep the snacks very small (i.e. think literally one or two mini pretzels when a serving would be 10-20) or take a conventional 100-200 calorie snack and divide it up throughout the day.
Has anyone else tried something similar? Are there any "plot holes" in my idea that I could be missing?
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/mzhep5/i_experimented_with_a_new_idea_to_satisfy_my/
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