Avoid Overeating by Waiting for Seconds

Those of us who have diabetes know that it takes about a quarter of an hour for us to digest our food after we eat, so we don’t feel full until then. The basic idea is to wait a little while before we grab seconds.

This is especially important at this holiday season of celebration and overeating and when our meal includes even a little carbohydrate. That’s because eating carbs can actually make us hungry. This counterintuitive reaction is something that I have written about at HealthCentral.com in my article, “How Eating Can Make You Hungry” at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/18362/eating-make-hungry

But waiting “a little while” is not precise enough. Most of us have a hard time gauging the passage of time. Others can’t stop checking the clock when they are thinking about eating.

My idea is to time the wait with my kitchen timer.

What I have been doing is setting my timer when I finish a meal. I set it to go off in 15 or 20 minutes. I promise myself that if I am still hungry then, I will have seconds or something else. But the amazing thing is that by that time I almost always feel full.

We have to keep our promises — especially those that we make to ourselves.  We have to be honest with ourselves and ask whether we are hungry or if we just want to eat more to attempt to fill another void in our life or maybe just because the food was just so wonderful delicious.

Now that I have learned this simple strategy I have finally been able to bring my weight down to my goal, a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 19.5. It’s hardly the only strategy that I follow, but it is the icing on the cake (neither of which has any attraction for me any more). My weight today is 156, exactly half of what it was when I finally began to take it seriously on February 6, 2006.

This weight loss strategy is a wait strategy, and it works especially well for people like me who tend to eat too fast. My rationale is that I don’t want my food to get cold as I dawdle over it. But this makes me more likely to overeat, becoming over full only later.

Please try using a timer and let me know if this helps.

This article is based on an earlier version of my article published by HealthCentral.