Ever manage to inadvertently start following a healthy eating pattern?
This weekend, I realized that I’ve established two useful food guidelines over the past few years: I don’t eat in the car, and I don’t eat in front of the TV.
Both situations came about entirely by accident.
I purchased a car with a manual transmission six years ago, meaning that the “extra” hand required to eat while driving is only accessible when cruising speed has been reached on the interstate. City driving does not free up this hand. As a bonus, the car’s tiny cupholders are a marvel of engineering; the two up front are too small for anything but a 12-ounce soda can, and the larger one between the buckets seats requires the flexibility of a Cirque performer to reach.
The living room embargo is a bit more complicated. As we watched the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina approach our home in Mobile in 2005, we grabbed our table from the dining room and flipped it onto the bed in hopes of keeping it dry. We ended up with only the back third of the house flooded, but the teardown, rewiring, rebuilding, re-everything meant that the table was taken apart and stored in the bedroom closet for the better part of two years.
What I discovered during this time was that no matter your intentions, eating dinner in the living room off of the coffee table pretty much ensures that you WILL turn the TV on. It’s just what happens. And once the TV is on, conversation is off.
The first thing I set up upon arrival in Huntsville, therefore, was the table. There have been no dinners in front of Smallville, no breakfasts in front of The Soup. Just talking, newspaper-reading, and, occasionally, a subtle Pandora soundtrack.
Not eating dinner in the living room leads to not eating much of anything in the living room except for the rare bowl of movie popcorn. Nobody heads to the kitchen and grabs a bag of chips to mindlessly munch on; nobody sits down with a sleeve of cookies to polish off.
Focused eating is more likely to be healthy eating, and dining without distraction makes for much better family time. And you don’t have to buy a manual transmission or wait for a flood: Declare the driver’s seat off limits for noshing, and insist that nothing crosses the dining room border but popcorn. In both cases, your seat cushions and your waistline will thank you.
Entirely Adequate 
I grew up in a house where you ate at the table and only at the table. Dinner was a family affair and the only accompaniment was conversation. It was lovely.
When I moved in with my hubby, he was a reader. And that was okay, I was good with reading over breakfast or at lunch or if no one else was home.
Then we started watching the occasional DVD with lunches. And then dinners. And then the DVD series turned into downloaded series and then we downsized to a tiny apartment with no room to eat at a table and ALL meals were eaten in front of our computers–the only real seats.
In the three years since I have tried in vain to put the kibosh on eating dinner anywhere but the table. That hasn’t gone so well, but we’re working on it. Someday we’ll get there again. : )
Funny — just this morning I was considering my habit of eating in front of the television.
I’d returned home from driving my girlfriend to work; that itself was a change in routine since we didn’t own a car until this past week. Now I was preparing coffee and determining not to perform my daily habit of planting myself in front of my computer screen. Today I was going to begin my day differently: I was going to read a book while enjoying my first cups.
My mind then wandered to my habit of eating lunch while (not really) watching one television program or another; it’s become a habit due to convenience. A book or magazine article needs to be located, propped open or up and paged through. I’m lazy, and a sloppy eater. I usually don’t want to hassle with locating something to read, and it bothers me to get my books greasy. Television requires very little, if any, preparation and attending to. If I’m simply eating a quick meal, I’m generally not even paying attention to what I’m watching: it’s simply there to keep me company while chewing and swallowing my food.
It would be difficult for me to break the habit of eating in front of the box. Not impossible, but difficult. For one thing, I’ve got to learn to eat slower. I tend to consume my food rather quickly, a lifelong habit I’ve not yet committed to breaking. Slowing down my eating would itself provide a better result: I’d probably eat less due to feeling full faster. (Plus I wouldn’t be risking choking as often as I do.)
Eating in front of the television seems ingrained in me; my entire life my family — in other words, mom and I — ate while watching a TV show. Many nights, that was our time together — we didn’t regularly converse over a table like some families. We preferred to laugh while watching Cheers or Roseanne or Frasier…
I remember it was always kind of a big deal when I was a kid to eat in front of the TV … we even had a set of four TV trays just for the occasion. I remember, too, that when family interests split and teenage awkwardness abounded, enforced family dinner time was a struggle for everybody.
I’m still a fan of reading and eating, especially at breakfast, but I’ve always got a magazine ready to drop food on if I’m eating lunch or dinner by myself. I credit the weekly New Yorker for the fact that I even HAVE enough to talk about at dinner most nights.
I’ve been on a bit of a better eating kick for the past three years, and slowing down has been part of that. We do eat less, and enjoy what we’re eating more when we’re paying attention to it. The TV’s not off limits – there’s no official edict – but nobody has been inclined to move dinner to the living room since we moved up here. We even DVR’d the first 20 minutes of the Super Bowl so we could eat at the table!