For many of the women I work with, the honest answer is I genuinely cannot remember.
What changes when you sit down
Most of us have been told that what we eat is the thing that matters. And of course it matters. But after thirteen years of clinical practice, I can tell you this with confidence: how you eat shapes your body almost as powerfully as what you eat does.
When you eat while standing, walking, scrolling, or watching, three things happen at once.
Your body's satiety signals — the quiet I am full now message that travels from your gut to your brain — take about twenty minutes to register. In that window, if you're distracted, you blow straight through them. You finish the plate without ever feeling the stop.
Your digestion runs best in what's sometimes called rest-and-digest mode, regulated by the vagus nerve — the same nerve that calms your nervous system. A hurried, standing, anxious meal is a meal eaten by a body in the wrong gear. Bloating, sluggish digestion, the foggy feeling afterwards: often that's not the food. It's the speed.
And — most quietly — you miss the taste. You eat the meal and never actually taste it. Which is its own kind of poverty, because food is one of the most consistent, daily gifts God places on the table of an ordinary life.
Almost every meal in the Bible is a table meal
Read the Gospels carefully and you'll notice something: Jesus is almost always eating. With Levi the tax collector. With the disciples the night before the cross. With Mary and Martha. With strangers at a wedding feast. With Zacchaeus, in a way that scandalised the religious crowd. He doesn't snack. He doesn't grab. He sits down.
And the meal becomes the place where the deepest things get said. The Last Supper happens at a table. Abraham hosts the Lord himself at a table beneath the oaks of Mamre. The wedding banquet that closes the book of Revelation — the one we are all moving toward — is a feast, at a table.
"Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in Him."— Psalm 34:8
I love the verb pairing in that line. Taste — and see. You cannot truly see what you've been given if you haven't slowed down enough to taste it.
A small practice to try
Here's one small experiment for the week ahead. One meal a day — that's all — sat at an actual table, with three small ingredients:
- A real surface. Not a counter, not a couch, not a steering wheel. A table, even a small one, even just for you.
- No screens. Phone face-down, TV off, nothing pulling your attention sideways.
- A short prayer of thanks before the first bite. Three sentences are enough: Father, thank You for this food. Thank You for the hands that grew it and the body that will use it. Help me eat it slowly.
That's it. I'm not asking you to overhaul your week, change what you eat, or do this for every meal. One meal a day, at a table, undistracted, with thanks. Notice what you taste. Notice what the stop feels like when you let it arrive.
And once you're sitting down, there's a gentle next move — not taking something off the plate, but adding one good thing to it. That's the heart of Add, Don't Subtract.