Small Steps to Health

Keep Your Mouth Busy to Avoid Reaching for Food

January 26th, 2008 by asithi · No Comments

Tagged Healthy Eating

Sometimes when you want to eat when you are not hungry, the best thing to do is to distract yourself. However that is not always possible when you are in an office meeting and the box of donuts is just sitting in front of you at the conference table. Unless you love your work and the conversation is so simulating that you can forget about all the other random thoughts rattling inside your head, you will probably keep glancing at that pink box until you find yourself reaching for one.

In situations where you cannot avoid the food, the best thing you can do is keep your mouth busy. You can try talking, but in social situations, you really should let your friends have a chance to talk at least once during your entire conversation. What I meant by keeping your mouth busy is by overwhelming your taste buds with a mentholated cough drop or Listerine breath strip.

Whenever I get the urge to eat when I consciously know that I should not, I would take a Halls mentho-lyptus cough drop (the one with the vapor action). It overwhelms my taste buds and sense of smell, so that the bread basket or the donut box does not looking so appealing anymore. Before I was able to train myself to equate taking a cough drop with a flashing STOP sign in mind, I would still reach for the food. But after numerous attempts of eating bread immediately after taking a cough drop as I wait for my dinner at a restaurant, I find that the bread is just not as tasty when your entire mouth, sinus, and throat is overwhelmed by the vapor action of the cough drop.

Eventually you will learn to equate taking a cough drop or breath strip as a flashing STOP sign when you take one (or two) when you have a craving for the food. And you get the added bonus of instantaneously overwhelming your taste buds and sense of smell so that you will eat less of whatever food you are reaching for. So give it a try to see if this will work for you.

Until next time and thanks for stopping by.

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