These 3 Tips Can Help You Eat Slower—And Support Your Weight Goals

Most people know that what you eat has an effect on your weight. But modifying how you eat can be crucial too, according to researchers.

A new study, published in March in the journal Nutrients, found that the following three interventions can be useful to lengthen the duration of your meal and curb the risk of overeating:

• Taking smaller bites
• Chewing more
• Listening to slow music while eating

Previous research has shown that taking more time to finish what’s on your plate can help reduce the amount of food and calories you eat, which could be helpful for people with obesity.

Now, there’s more concrete evidence of how people can actually do that. “The study scientifically clarified what had been explained to patients in vague terms of ‘eating slowly,’” study author Katsumi Iizuka, MD, PhD, professor in the department of clinical nutrition at Fujita Health University in Japan, told Health.

For this study, Iizuka and his colleagues recruited 33 participants ranging in age from 20 to 65, all of whom were healthy and did not have obesity or other health issues.

Participants ate four small pizza slices under different conditions—listening to either no music, or to metronome rhythms at 40 beats per minute (bpm), 80 bpm, or 160 bpm.

Researchers also measured participants’ meal duration, number of bites, number of chews, and chewing speed for each test.

The results showed fairly stark differences across men and women in the study:

• Number of bites. On average, female participants took about 4.5 bites to finish their pizza slice, while men took just 2.1 bites.
• Number of chews. Women chewed an average of 107 times during their meal, and men chewed 80 times.
• Meal duration. It took women an average of 87 seconds to finish their meal, while it took men 63 seconds.

But after adjusting for sex, the researchers found that the duration of a person’s meal was connected to how many bites and chews they took—smaller bites and more time spent chewing were linked to longer meals, while bigger bites and fewer chews were linked to shorter meals.

The data also showed that when participants listened to slow metronome rhythms at 40 bpm, they took more time to finish their meal.

Overall, this study “does a good job of demonstrating how small, simple changes can have an effect on weight and overall [food] intake,” Dana Hunnes, PhD, MPH, RD, a clinical inpatient dietitian at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and an adjunct assistant professor at of community health sciences at the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, told Health.

But why can these behavior tweaks help people eat slower (and, by extension, manage weight)?

Taking Smaller Bites of Food

Simply, when people take smaller bites of their food, it means they spend more time finishing what’s on their plate. “Naturally, the [person] with more bites will take longer,” Iizuka said.

Not only are meals longer when you take smaller bites, but doing so “gives our bodies more time to feel satiated,” or full, Hunnes explained, lessening the chance that you’ll overeat.

“Satiety is both volume regulated and time regulated,” she said. “It can often take 20 minutes to feel satiety after we start eating. So, if we take smaller bites, we take longer to eat, which gives our body more time to realize it’s had enough.”

Chewing More As You’re Eating

It’s a similar story for the number of chews it takes for you to finish a meal.

If you chew more while food is in your mouth, your meal duration will naturally increase, Iizuka said. For most people, “the number of chews per minute is constant,” so you’re simply decreasing the amount of food you’re eating over a given period of time.

“This is why we are told to chew more than 30 times,” he said.

People who don’t chew their food for as long “tend to eat more quickly and likely don’t have time for the satiety hormone sensation to kick in,” Hunnes added. “They’ll still be hungry and want to eat more, and therefore take in more calories.”

Listening to Music

Having music on in the background during a meal—particularly if it has a calming, slow beat—seems to help people accomplish these other two behaviors more easily, Iizuka said.

“When we are calm, can focus on our eating, and be in the moment, we can pay more attention to our hunger and satiety cues and slow down,” said Hunnes. “Slowing down can give us a chance to really taste our food, give our stomach time to feel full.”

Though the study provides some actionable steps to slow your eating and potentially manage weight, there were some limitations.

For one, the study was quite small. It’s also not clear if these results would hold up if researchers ran these tests with foods that aren’t as easy to eat as a slice of pizza.

“[Future research] would need to have more people, a larger variety of foods—both those that are calorie dense, and nutrient dense [and] lower calorie, like salads—and see if there is a difference in how much people consume based on what they’re consuming,” Hunnes said. “This is an interesting start, but I think more research is useful, always.”

For people looking to maintain their weight or break a habit of overeating, the “most important thing” to do is “reduce the amount of food in each mouthful,” Iizuka said. Chew well, and don’t take your next bite until you’ve finished the first one, he recommended.

“As for meal time, 15 minutes is said to be a good length,” he said.

Beyond listening to slow music, chewing more, and taking smaller bites, you should be able to increase your eating time by simply being “in the moment” during meals, Hunnes advised. Pay attention to the taste, crunch, texture, and feeling of your food as you’re eating.

“It’s not a race,” she stressed. “The faster you eat, the more you eat. Most of the time, we don’t need to be eating nearly as much as we do, so slow down.”