Try This Ritual for More Composure While Eating.
Rituals can help us have better control over our lives and feel more comfortable in situations that would otherwise bother us. One group of researchers now claims they have found that weird, mindless food rituals can help us eat fewer calories.
In a ritual (published as a paywall in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , but also described here ), you do three things every time you eat. Here are the instructions the researchers presented to the study participants:
- Cut your food into pieces before you eat it.
- Second, rearrange the pieces so that they are perfectly symmetrical on your plate. That is, make the right half of the plate look exactly like the left half of the plate.
- Finally, press the cutlery against the top of the dish three times.
The people in the study – female students trying to lose weight who were hired by the researchers at the campus gym – ate fewer calories per day if they were in the group performing the ritual. The control group was simply asked to eat “mindfully” but received no instructions.
The researchers say there is nothing special about any of the steps; they designed the ritual to be arbitrary, but simple and repeatable. He was also strict: “To participate in the study, you must complete the three steps of this ritual every time you eat.”
What does it mean to follow this ritual
I tried this ritual for several meals. It seems silly . I ate leftover Thai curry with rice for lunch yesterday. I cut off several large chunks of chicken with the side of a fork and then did my best to cook the dish symmetrically. I have a feeling that this ritual does not work equally well for all products; what would you do with the soup? (That wasn’t nearly as silly as thosemindful eating exercises where you rub an orange on your lips, though .)
There was pizza for dinner. I cut it open, laid it out and pressed the dishes (well, fingers) to the food three times. For breakfast the next day, I wondered if I wanted toast or oatmeal and then decided I wasn’t going to worry. I’m not the only one who is tired of this ritual: the researchers note that “at the end of the study, our participants said that they thought the ritual was not very helpful and said they were unlikely to continue it.”
But I really liked that adding a little ritual before each meal made me pay a little more attention to the meals I ate. Overly harsh rituals can be a sign of an eating disorder , but there is room for healthy rituals in our lives. For example, maybe you enjoy making coffee the same way every morning. We also participate in food rituals on social occasions: we sing before serving the birthday cake, clink glasses in toast before drinking.
So, try this ritual if you want to see if it works for you. Or better yet, come up with your own.