Mindfulness and savoring 74 the time to taste it and enjoy it? The only thing worse than not eating your favorite food, is not enjoying it when you do. In the last chapter we spoke about identifying your High Sacrifice Foods( HSFs) and retaining them in your diet. Savoring is one of the main ways we can eat less of our HSF while enjoying them more. Speed kills … And every kilogram over the limit can be a killer. Eating quickly is a major contributor to weight gain. The biggest problem with excessive weight gain is premature death. While it has been recognized for some time, I believe the importance of managing the speed of eating is grossly under-rated. As I developed ways of helping people keep the weight off long-term by minimizing sacrifices, the need to deal with speed eating more fully became obvious. What I like about dealing with the speed problem is that it requires the lowest sacrifice of all the maneuvers that I use. Put another way, it is the easiest change we can make to lose weight. This is because eating slowly and mindfully means we taste our food fully and enjoy it even more and in the end it makes it much easier for us to eat less. If we eat more slowly we will not eat so much after we feel full. Remember the 20-minute delay between being full and when our brain lets us know that we are full that we discussed in Chapter 5? To recap, if we eat at high speed we can take in a lot more food between when we are actually full and when we realize it. Eating protein and filling, less energy dense foods is a key to managing this problem. Now let us add mindfulness into the equation. The natural solution – the third Zen question I would estimate that the majority of overweight people are eating most of their excess calories each day in this 20 minute period, especially at lunch and dinner. Just stopping this alone would, for many people, turn their weight balance around – from positive to negative.