Mindfulness and savoring 75 Fullness is the ultimate appetite suppressant. Drug companies around the world are currently spending millions of dollars looking for drugs that make us feel full so that we can find it easier to not over-eat. Surgeons everywhere are doing lap-banding surgery so that people feel full after only a small amount of food. Either way the goal is simply to get you to feel full! I think there are cheaper and easier ways to do this. Unfortunately, in our society today, natural strategies like learning to meditate on your degree of fullness and, thereby, your degree of hunger, are not sexy, make no one any money and so do not attract significant advertising dollars. To be able to lose weight without spending any money, risking a general anesthetic or the surgeon’ s knife, is a rather compelling argument for becoming expert at feeling full. It is as simple as eating slowly enough to give ourselves time to notice that we are full. I had a problem with eating food quickly. My wife pointed this out one day and until then I had not even noticed it. Once I stopped and looked at it, I came to understand it, but until then I had no conscious awareness of why I did this. It was a classic example of how we learn things in our formative years and how, without conscious awareness, we maintain the behavior unconsciously until we stop and study ourselves. Learning to do this in all areas of our life is critical because, once you become aware of unconscious motivations, you can control them; what you remain unaware of controls you. I will expand on these unconscious processes and how they feed into self-sabotage in Chapter 13. Why did I eat so fast? I grew up in a family of four boys, all of them active, with big appetites. Occasionally, for a special treat – if we were on holidays or away for the weekend – we would be allowed to have Fruit Loops as our breakfast cereal instead of some more serious and mundane food like porridge. So on these special mornings we would pour out four bowls of Fruit Loops and eat them very quickly so that we could get seconds – knowing full well that there were only about six, maybe seven bowls of cereal in a Fruit Loops packet. And, of course, he who hesitated, or savored, was lost!