Mindful Eating
Current obsession: Food
Not just eating food or watching endless videos of how chefs cook, but the whole concept of eating in general. Somedays, I eat to live. Other days, I live to eat. And recently, I came across mindful eating.
There are 2 greatest addictions in the world — food and sex. They are arguably the 2 activities in the world that uses all 5 senses. Sight, auditory, kinesthetic, smell and taste. Hence, good food and good sex are both orgasmic, where 5 senses are aroused at the same time.
Back to mindful eating. I realised a routine I have when I am eating. I have my Netflix or youtube running in the background as I enjoyed my meal. It brought me to a realisation that I was eating for the sake of eating, and not truly appreciating the meal. (As a matter of fact, I made a lot of my own meals. So it’s silly to not enjoy it.)
How to do mindful eating?
I started to become more aware of my food and my meals.
What can I smell? Does it remind me of another moment in life? What colours do I see in the plate?
Take a scoop. What ingredients are on the spoon?
How does it taste like when the food first enters my mouth? Chew a little, and what to I taste now? How is the texture of my food developing from when it first touched my lips, waiting to embrace the food in my mouth?
Now swallow it. Is there an after taste? Can I guess the various ingredients that were used? What enhanced the flavours, is it the salt, sugar, butter or spices?
Take another bite. How is it different from the first? What texture can I get from this bite? How are the flavours mixing and how is the texture improving the flavours?
Mindful Breakfast
As I become more aware of each bite I took, my meal suddenly became layered with depths! I had my usual cinnamon, mash banana overnight oats topped with my favourite fresh sweet China apple, cut into bite size. It was amazing, absolutely amazing.
The cinnamon and banana filled my nose when I opened my breakfast oats. The colour was a stunning yellow-white, dotted with ground cinnamon. I chopped up my apple and tossed it into the bowl. I mixed it around, watching the red apple skin adding to the hues of my breakfast bowl.
I scooped a spoonful of goodness. It was the first time I added bananas into the breakfast oats the night before, so the natural sweetness was something new. The oats looked amazing. A bite-sized apple piece laying gently on top of a bed of oats, flavoured with cinnamon spice. And I could smell the natural sweetness of the banana from that spoon. I couldn’t wait to dig in!
Oh dear, the first bite was amazing. The sweetness from the banana, the rich texture from the oats and milk and I’m now biting into the crunchy apple piece. Sweetness and juice from the apple mixes with the banana, only to be enriched by the presence of the cinnamon spice. Wow. Does it get better?
I kept looking at the food while taking another bite. It was amazing. Visually, it was not as appealing, because the colours do not pop, unlike my other summer fruit breakfast oats. But man, it was beyond delicious. Even more so than my mango, pomegranate, figs, almond and banana oats, topped with chopped dark chocolate bits.
I took a bite after another, cautious of it’s pure goodness. And by the time I was done, I was beyond full! That is new, because I usually eat really fast and still think that I am hungry before my brain processes what is in my stomach. That’s amazing.
But this is nothing new. Mindful eating is mentioned many times and various ways. Nothing is new. But I started doing a lot more fun things to be mindful of my bites.
Process
I have different phases in my year, where I am absolutely obsessed with a couple of things. One of my current obsession is food. And this goes beyond the eating part. Eating is easy, open your mouth, put the food in, chew it and swallow. The beauty of food, in my opinion, lies in the art of the creation process.
I started to watch YouTube videos on how people make food. Current obsessions: Guga Food, Binging with Babish, Pick Up Limes, Sorted, just to name a few.
Science
Enzymes + supply chain
History