Episode 6: Take a Mealtime Intermission

Description: This week on Self-Care for Educators, Tina invites you to try a simple but powerful strategy: the mealtime intermission. Instead of rushing through your food while multitasking, pause halfway through one meal and give yourself a full minute to check in with your body. This small shift can help you slow down, enjoy your food, and reconnect with how you feel.

Resources: Use the code Wellness20 to get 20% off Tina's book 180 Day of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators.

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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to episode six of season six of Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren, and I'm so happy you're here. This week I'm going to offer up one more chapter of the book to give you a little preview of my latest book, 180 Days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators, which might help nudge you to utilize the code Wellness20 to get 20% off of the book at solutiontree.com. As a reminder, that code is good until November 30th, so you still have time to take advantage of it. 

Last week, what I did is I shared with you week one and that was Take a Five Minute Action. So I thought I would do this one more time this week by just moving to week two and sharing exactly what's in the book using that as our invitation for this week. So it gives you your kind of goals, your thing to work on for this week, and it offers up a preview of the structure and kind of the format and the voice that I use in the book 180 days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators. 

So here we go. This is week two. Take a mealtime intermission.

How often do you scarf down your food while doing other things, answering emails, grading papers, making copies, or driving even, for example? Most of us do this often, if not the majority of the time. Howard Lewine, the Chief Medical Editor of Harvard Health Publishing points out that when we multitask while eating, we tend to eat more than we need. When we instead take a mealtime intermission, we're better able to recognize when we're satisfied. Here's the deal. It takes about 20 minutes or so for our brain to get the signal that we've had enough to eat. So the mealtime intermission helps us stay connected to our body rather than eating in record time without enjoying or noticing our meal.

Ta-da. This week's invitation. Slow down while eating one meal this week. Most likely you've heard the advice to slow down while eating, but how exactly do you do that? Well, a mealtime intermission is exactly what it sounds like, and it helps you slow down. 

When you are about halfway done with your meal simply stop for at least one minute longer if you can. Before you pick up your fork or food and start eating again. You may not be at the 20 minute mark exactly, but you are at least allowing yourself time to pause and thus slowing down your mealtime. Doing this allows you to stay connected to your body so you can feel whether you are satisfied and can stop eating, or if you want to continue with the second half.

Many of us spend our days only in our heads, and we may forget that we even have a body. When we slow down and pause for a minute or longer, we can shift our attention to how our body feels in that moment. For example, we can start to consider if our stomach feels full. Has our body registered that we've eaten something? Do we feel satisfied enough to stop eating? Or are we still hungry enough to keep going? It can take time to get back into our body and out of our head, but I promise you this gets easier with practice. 

So for one meal of your day, after you sit down to eat, make a mental note of the halfway point in your food. When you reach that point, put down your utensils. Or the food and simply pause for one full minute longer if you'd like. Don't do anything else during this time. Don't read, don't pick up your phone. Don't watch anything. Simply sit and take stock of how you're feeling in your body and whether your hunger is satisfied, and if you wanna stop eating or if you're ready for more.

To remember to do this, give yourself a visual cue. For example, you can organize your food on your plate with some empty space down the middle, or you can even use multiple plates, like make your side salad in a separate bowl, for example so you are queued to pause between plates. Remember, you can ramp up or cut back your efforts if you need to this week.

So here's how you can dial it up. Do this for every meal and every snack each day, even when you're eating with others or out at a restaurant, maybe you extend the strategy to the weekend. You might also consider what you thought about during each intermission you took, how many times you chose to stop eating halfway through a meal or before you cleaned your plate. And if you are eating enough to stay satisfied until your next meal. Remember, you can always dial it down as needed. 

So here's what I need you to remember. It may feel more doable to do this at lunch or dinner, or perhaps at every meal, but only one or two days this week rather than every day. Again, I provide an accountability chart where you write down what meal you decided to try this at, how long you waited, and any notes. And then at the end of the week, here's your reflection questions. Did you incorporate the mealtime intermission this week? If not, why not? How did you help yourself? Remember to take a mealtime intermission? How did taking a mealtime intermission make you feel? What did you notice in your body? And do you plan to continue to do this? If so, how will you keep yourself accountable? 

So that's what I want you to try. I'm gonna do it alongside. As always, you guys, I would never ask you to do something I'm not willing to try and work on and do myself. I used to be really good about this and then like so many of these strategies as I'm reading this, I'm like, man, huh. I don't do a very good job with this anymore. So I'm recommitting to the mealtime intermission as well. So let's work on that this week. 

And if you like what you heard, maybe that is your nudge, that it is time for you to head on over to solutiontree.com, purchase the book 180 Days of Physical Wellness for Busy Educators, and use code Wellness20 to treat yourself and to really dig into what it means to take care of your physical wellness this year. You can start the book at any time. Week one does not correlate necessarily to week one of the school year. So you're not too late, you're not behind. You can start right now. 

I am so grateful, uh, for Adrienne, for doing all the things to make sure that this podcast actually gets to you. I'm grateful to Marzano Resources. I'm grateful to Solution Tree, especially for offering up this discount, especially for podcast listeners and for you my badass self-care squad cheering so stinking hard for you. I hope you have an amazing week. Feel my hand on your back this week as you do all of the things, including taking a mealtime intermission. You're amazing. I love you.