Parallel Eating: Transforming Mealtimes Together

Hey there!

This week, Dr. Angela and Marchelle dive into the fascinating concept of "Parallel Eating" – a unique approach to mealtime that can transform your eating habits and relationships. 🎧🍽️ Tune in to learn all about it!

What You'll Discover:

What is Parallel Eating? 🥗: Understand the concept of eating together without eating the same foods and its roots in the world of Special Education.

Mindful Eating Tips 🧘‍♀️: How eating with others can promote more mindful eating habits and why this matters for your health.

Social Benefits🌟: Discover how shared mealtimes can foster a sense of community and improve your overall relationship with food.

Practical Applications🍴: Find out how you can implement Parallel Eating in your own life, whether at home or in public spaces.

Healthy Modeling 🥦: Learn how modeling healthy eating habits can influence your loved ones positively.

Why You Should Listen:

Innovative Approach 🚀: Explore a new, practical way to maintain your healthy eating habits without feeling isolated or pressured by others' food choices.

Expert Insights 🔍: Hear from Dr. Angela and Marchelle as they unpack the concept and share their professional and personal perspectives.

Actionable Tips 📝: Practical advice on how to incorporate Parallel Eating into your daily life, making mealtimes more enjoyable and healthy.

Don't miss this enlightening episode! 

Episode Highlights:

(08:14) The idea in parallel eating in the Special Education world is to pair the special needs children with normal peers; the full lesson includes grocery shopping, preparing the foods together, and they'll finally eat together. And over time, the idea is to teach the children healthy eating, and lots of other life skills and social skills along the way.

That way, the educators will give the families and the students a foundation for how to eat healthy.

(14:59) There are a lot of benefits to this idea of parallel eating. First, if you do it correctly, you can be more mindful. Think about how often we're running through a drive-thru and then we're wolfing down a sandwich all by ourselves in our car … we just grab the food and we eat it really fast and we're not mindful about anything.

When you're with other people, even if you're not exactly eating the same things, the presence of other people will encourage slower, more mindful eating.

(19:51) Studies show that eating with others can influence our food choices and our portion sizes. It's called “social facilitation of eating” For example, sometimes people will actually tend to eat more and not less when they're around other people. Oftentimes marriage means weight gain for women because they end up eating the same amounts of food as their husbands, even though they're smaller and they don't need as much food.

So parallel eating could be really helpful here because each person can choose the type of food and the amount of food based on their own needs and they just eat together for the shared experience and camaraderie.

#Weightloss #LastingWeightloss #ParallelEating #MindfulEating #FoodIndustry