I was
reading one of those self-help articles on the web, on the site health.com the
other day. It was on New Year’s Day,
when about three-quarters of the population of the prosperous Western World
make New Year’s resolutions to lose weight.
The article I was reading was therefore, predictably, a list of helpful
hints for losing weight. Specifically,
it offered ‘14 Ways to Cut Portions Without Feeling Hungry.’ If you’re a veteran of the weight-loss wars
as I am, you know that the biggest impediment to eating less is that, when you
do, you feel hungry.
Predictably, then, helpful hint number six was, ‘Set the Scene for
Slower Eating.’ As most of us know,
eating fast makes us continue to eat after we’re really sated, because the
brain hasn’t yet had enough time to receive the signal from the stomach that
the latter is full. It cannot yet,
therefore, inform us that we’re no longer hungry. So, by the time we get the message, we’ve
continued to eat – unnecessarily. Had we
eaten more slowly, we would have given our stomachs and brains a chance to
still the hand with the fork. Hint
number six, therefore, suggests a number of tactics to slow down our
eating. We should dim the lights and put
on some relaxing music to set the tone for a more leisurely meal. We should chew slowly, put the fork down
between bites, and sip water continuously to make the meal last longer.
Intellectually, this all sounds good, but of course there’s much more
than the intellect in play when we eat.
In our busy lives, we often eat in haste as a strategy to get the meal
over with and return to our long ‘to-do’ lists.
We eat on the run between tasks and appointments. In America, we famously as a nation eat
whilst driving our cars. Of course,
nobody would dream of eating whilst driving here in Queensland, lest he draw
the attention of the Queensland Constabulary and receive a fine of $330 accompanied
by three demerit points. Ah, the Nanny
State…but I digress.
So even if you don’t eat behind the wheel, you have probably eaten
enough meals on the run in your life to know that eating that way makes your
meal far less enjoyable. And yet we do
often eat that way out of habit, because we are so used to being pressed for
time.
In this week’s Torah reading, the people Israel are instructed to eat
their Passover sacrifice in haste. In
Exodus chapter 12, verse 11 they are instructed: You must eat it with your waist belted,
your shoes on your feet, and your staff in your hand. In other words, they must eat it in
complete readiness to move out on signal.
It’s not only the eating of the Passover sacrifice that must be done in
haste. Also the baking of bread without
giving the dough time to rise. That, of
course, yields matzo – represented on our Passover tables today by the
ubiquitous square cracker-like sheets.
Contrast this with the way we’re instructed to eat our Passover Seder
today. We’re told to eat whilst
reclining, at a deliberately leisurely pace.
The reason is that the exodus has already occurred. We’re out of Egypt. We eat a leisurely meal in recognition of the
freedom we now enjoy.
Although the Passover Seder is
just one of over a thousand meals we’ll eat during the year – two of the
thousand for those of us who insist on maintaining the tradition of two Seders
– it would serve us well to learn to apply this lesson to our daily meals. To take our time and eat with a deliberate
slowness as an expression of our freedom.
To fence off a good half-hour for each breakfast and lunch, even if
we’re eating alone. And an hour for
dinner. Turn off the mobile phones and
tablets for that time, look across the table at our companions, and enjoy a
little face time instead of worrying about responding to a call on Face Time.
Since it is not socially acceptable to eat whilst driving here, I’ve
unlearned that bad habit. I am still
working to teach myself to really slow down when eating. It’s a good lesson to learn. To remember that we are, after all,
free men and women. And to help us in
fighting the Battle of the Bulge.
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