Weed, California, April 14, 2008: This weekend my brother David and his new wife Annie came to visit me. My little brother is now 48 and is working on a larger project in Silicon Valley that involves General Dynamics and the gubbamint. So they kindly drove up to the mountains to say howdy, and I discover that I’m awfully proud of the fine man my brother has become and Annie is just a delightful woman, whose company I enjoyed.
We mostly just talked about happenings in our lives (moves and kinfolks), what we’re studying (Tolle, the Secret), and we ate delicious meals and drove around to scenic vistas.
And they showed me the Amazing Fork Trick.
The dust has mostly settled from moving into the new factory shop that we built, and I’ve been focussing on losing weight and having more energy. So I’ve been getting back to my Vegistentialist way of eating, and following my 3HourCycle/3MinuteGym method of exercise.
Now, all my life I’ve tended to have the gobbles. That is, I eat (they say) too fast, and I have an automatic tendency to eat everything on my plate. And I’m at least a hundred pounds heavier than I was at one time in my life. Having been both thin and fat, I can report that being thin is not only more fun, and not only can you wear nicer-looking clothes, but the nervous system seems to work faster and better when thin.
But back to the Amazing Fork Trick.
I’ve noticed that, if I eat a largely-vegetable diet, then my tendency to eat a large volume of food doesn’t matter much. My weight stays the same or maybe drops, but it won’t increase. And when I stay away from eating animal products — meat, fish, milk, cheese — my weight drops as well. But still I have a tendency to eat a large volume of food.
The Amazing Fork Trick seems to help that.
I’ve read, as perhaps we all have read, that we should sit at table, and have no TV on, and we should focus on our food. Though I’ve read this, I pretty much rarely remember to do it. But the Amazing Fork Trick is a simple exercise that causes this to happen.
It’s just this …
(1) You take a bite of food.
(2) You put your fork down, and take your hand away from it.
(3) Now you chew and enjoy your food.
(4) Only when that’s gone do you pick up your fork again.
David and Annie were doing the Fork Trick, and so I tried it too. During dinner at the Mexican Restaurant (even with the Patron shot and the Margharita!), and at the big breakfast at the HiLo, and at lunch and dinner yesterday.
For some reason, putting the fork down makes it easy to enjoy and focus on the food, and it also slows down the process. In each case, I’ve eaten much less, sometimes half as much as usual, and noticed that I was feeling content (shift in blood sugar), and my stomach felt comfortable (enough food). Of course, I’m also *trying* to notice when I feel the blood sugar shift and the change in stomach feeling.
I think I’ve found a workable way to eat less food.
Maybe one of these days I’ll be back down to my fighting weight.
There you are.
The Amazing Fork Trick.
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