Eating With Our Eyes

Over the past few years, as I’ve started watching the Food Network and developing into a bit of a foodie, I’ve become familiar with the expression, “We eat first with our eyes.” Seeing how the famous chefs present some of their food, and experiencing it first-hand in some fancy restaurants, I could understand the appeal of that. But for some reason I never quite internalized the idea for home use when I was the only one eating.

Even when I first took the “Am I Hungry?” facilitator training and read the part about how we should make a pleasant atmosphere for ourselves, I have to confess that I didn’t think that using nice dishes mattered all that much. Mine weren’t hideous or anything, but they were definitely generic, mass-produced plates and bowls, primarily white. I did have one nice pottery mug and bowl, but that was about it.

When I recently taught the “Mindful Eating” workshop, though, I felt a bit like a hypocrite, saying that these things mattered but not doing them myself. So the following weekend, when I was at an art gallery and a pottery plate caught my eye, I bought it. I wanted to see if it would make a difference in how I ate.


I was surprised to discover that it did. By putting my food on this pretty plate, I found that I spent more time eating first with my eyes because it was so attractive. This in turn led me to eating more slowly and mindfully, because between bites I admired the way everything looked. I took smaller bites, wanting to keep everything nicely artistic. I also paid more attention to the smell, since I was more tempted me to linger over it a little longer before eating.


For instance, eggs look positively gorgeous against the blue background. Salad greens are beautiful with the earthy tones. In fact, everything seems to go with it, in brilliant contrast or complement. The pattern also makes me want to present the food in the most attractive or fun way, such as arranging browned sausage slices in a circle, following the plates design.



I’m now a believer. It does matter how your food looks and is presented, at home or in a restaurant. I’ve always appreciated beautiful things, especially when they’re also functional. Now I can indulge that on a daily basis and get the most out of both my pottery and my meals.

Cooking for Others

Today I’m finishing preparations for my annual Father’s Day tradition: making dinner for my dad and brother. I’ve been doing this for somewhere around 9 or 10 years, largely because that’s about how long my brother has been doing the Trek Across Maine, a 180-mile bike ride over three days that’s always Father’s Day weekend. It means that by the time he gets home on Sunday, he doesn’t particularly feel like cooking, and since my dad used to be the one to bring him home, it wasn’t always something he felt like doing, either.

It’s not a surprise that I decided that my present to them would be to make dinner. I’ve always enjoyed making food for others. As with so many, it’s one of the ways I express appreciation of people in my life. When I was younger, it was mostly baked goods, since I didn’t do much cooking, but no one really complained about the cookies, brownies, breads, cakes, cupcakes, and pies.

Once I started losing weight and actually cooking, though, I began to gravitate towards bringing healthy dishes – salads, soups, stir-frys, vegetable side dishes, fruit, etc. Except that I still enjoyed baking, too. So when I started being involved in young adult services at church, while I tried to make sure we had something moderately healthy, we often gravitated more towards sweets. That precipitated a bit of an existential crisis about it.

As I wrote in my book: “It put me in a rather strange position. On the one hand, I was careful about what I ate, but I was also providing lots of food, some of it not terribly healthy, to others. Did that make me a hypocrite? I struggled with that for a while before realizing that what other people ate wasn’t up to me, particularly because some people could get away with eating those things much better than I could. It actually worked out quite well because it gave me an excuse to bake and create all the foods I enjoyed, have a small taste, and then share the wealth.”

That was so important for me to understand. I didn’t want to be obnoxious about my food choices, forcing them onto others. I just wanted my example of eating, which sometimes included eating those sweets in small amounts, to show people another approach. It was a little hard to let go of the self-righteous feeling that I knew what people should be eating, until I realized that made me no better than all the other diet “experts” out there. We alone know what our body needs and can handle; who am I to judge what others consume, without knowing what else they’re experiencing?

For instance, on Father’s Day, after doing all that exercise, my brother actually needs quite a few calories, even though he is well-fed on the Trek. And since part of the deal is that he and my dad have to agree on the meal, it usually turns out being pretty well balanced. In the past, I’ve done things like tacos with side veggies and dessert, broiled scallops and bread and salad and pie, but the past few years chicken pot pie and Greek salad seems to be a winner, as well as some fruit pie for dessert (typically strawberry-rhubarb, given the time of year).

So these days, when I’m preparing for meals like this, I can do so without that inner angst, instead having a joyful heart, and knowing that the love and appreciation I feel for them will come through in the food.

Appreciation, or Taking Things For Granted

How often do you appreciate your body, and everything it’s capable of? How often do you notice all the things you don’t like about it? Is the second approach one you take more frequently than the first?

If you’re like me, then yes, you might tend to focus more often on the things that aren’t good. It’s so easy to take all the things that work for granted, because, well, they’re the way I want, and I don’t have to think about them. Whereas all the negative things are constantly drawing attention themselves, creating little niggling distractions, self-doubt, and disappointment. This was especially true when I was heavier, but even now, it’s something I struggle with.

The problem is that we can never take anything for granted, good or bad.

I recently read the book The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating by Maine author Elizabeth Bailey. It’s a memoir, written after the author had contracted an undiagnosed illness (possibly tick-borne encephalitis) that prevented her from doing almost anything. She was bedridden for a year, with periods of slow recovery and relapse. She doesn’t even know how she contracted it, and it certainly wasn’t because of anything she did, which makes it terribly unfair. (But then, to quote The Princess Bride, “Who said life is fair? Where is that written?”)

When she spent her year in bed, a time when even rolling over was an enormous effort, she occupied herself largely by studying a snail. But friends also visited, and she ruminated on their time with her. “I found myself preoccupied with the energy level of my visitors, and I started to observe them in the same detail with which I observed the snail. The random way my friends moved around the room astonished me; it was as if they didn’t know what to do with their energy. They were so careless with it. There were spontaneous gestures of their arms, the toss of a head, a sudden bend in a full body stretch as if it were nothing at all; or they might comb their fingers unnecessarily through their hair.” (p. 39)

This motion, the ability to walk to the kitchen for a drink, to spend energy in ways that we don’t even notice, is something that almost all of us share, regardless of size or weight. But we so rarely appreciate it. We just expect our bodies to do these things, like we expect to breathe, and have our hearts pump blood through our veins.

Those who are more able-bodied often take more extreme things for granted, such as climbing stairs without getting winded, or lifting something heavy, or walking for miles just for fun. We all get accustomed to our current levels and think that’s the way things will always be, rarely pausing to consider that it could be different.

But there’s the flip side, too. When you’re in that place of inability, you can get equally trapped into thinking that life will always be that way. That you’ll never be able to do the things you want. That’s what makes it so hard to appreciate what you currently have, when you constantly think about what you can’t do.

And yet, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can appreciate where you’re at, recognize the good in it, and know that you want to strive for a little more. More importantly, you can believe that in most cases it is, in fact, possible to achieve what you want, or at least make progress towards it.

When I was heavier, I used to tell myself that I’d like to climb mountains again, but I didn’t really believe that I could. Getting my unwieldy self up something so high was inconceivable. Which is why I so enjoyed recently hiking Pleasant Mountain, going up the Ledges Trail for an elevation gain of 1,600 feet. Not huge, but not inconsiderable.



Those are the things I don’t take for granted, and it makes me enjoy them all the more. I wish that I had thought to appreciate my body’s capabilities when I was heavier – even then, I could do so much that I didn’t acknowledge. Since I can’t go back in time, I will instead carry this forward to fully enjoy everything I do now, from hiking mountains to playing with my cats to being able to greet friends, not from a couch, but with a smile and a hug.

Existentialism and Chocolate

Most evenings, I treat myself to a Dove dark chocolate, the ones with a brief message inside the wrapper. Most of the times they’re inspirational sayings, or phrases promoting the delights of chocolate, but a recent one was a bit different.

“Calories only exist if you count them.”

Have any of you thought that before? Or how about the idea that broken cookies don’t have calories, or at least the crumbs don’t? Or that donut holes are calorie-free because, after all, a hole doesn’t have anything in it? Many of us play these games at one point or another, giving ourselves permission to eat things we don’t think we should be eating.

No matter what we tell ourselves, we all know that calories don’t require us to acknowledge them in order to add up. This is not quantum physics, where the act of observation can change the outcome.

We also know that cookies have the same number of calories no matter how many pieces they’re in, and that the donut hole isn’t really a “hole”, although it will have fewer calories than the whole donut.

If we know this, what’s the harm in these amusing phrases? If you truly recognize them as silly anecdotes and don’t act on them, probably nothing. But if you do use them to justify eating something that you’re not hungry for, it could become a problem.

The other drawback is that they can put you in more of a “diet” mentality. If you start thinking about whether to count the calories in cookie fragments, or donut holes, or cake crumbs, or chocolate, that leads you down the path of fretting about calories in general. And personally, if I’m preparing to eat a lovely piece of dark chocolate, I don’t want to sit around wondering in an existential way, “If a package has nutrition information but I don’t read it, do those calories and grams of fat/protein/carbohydrates count?”

Instead, I’ll stick with the approach I took with my chocolate, which was to crumple up the wrapper, throw it in the trash, and enjoy my treat, knowing that the calories would sort themselves out without any help from me.