Your enjoyment fades after taking the next bite and it continues to fade throughout the remainder of your meal.
At one point, eating was driven by the joy of consuming delicious food, savoring the taste of each morsel of food on your plate. The experience is both fun and delectable to the palette.
In the next moment, eating has become a chore, with the mere purpose of finishing your meal instead of eating for the taste of it or fulfilling your hunger cravings.
My husband and I are foodies, we enjoy food, so much so that we center our holidays and travel around cities and places that have an abundance of good restaurants and are known for great food.
In our early twenties after we graduated, due to lack of funds we made tasty homecooked meals, sought out cheap street food, and had the occasional splurge on Japanese sushi or a good steak on anniversaries and birthdays.
As the years passed, and our family income grew, we upgraded our food choices to include higher-end restaurants, cafes, and specialty dessert shops.
However, I noticed that although I had more access to food now, some that were quite unattainable ten years earlier, there grew a new limitation to my satisfaction level when consuming these delicious grubs.
It may partially be because I was now older and had a slower metabolism, but I could not stomach the same amount of food that I used to enjoy ten to fifteen years ago.
Due to my body having adapted to intake smaller portions of food, when I eat now, it would eventually hit a point where I wish I hadn’t ordered the amount of food on our table. You know, the dishes that were ordered when I was feeling hungry.
That meant I had to be careful not to over-order the food on the menu when dining out, and select only meals that we really wanted since we had our limits now.
It was a bummer because I wanted to taste the different food offerings on the menu, when more than one catches my eye.
Because other than nourishment, we are paying for the enjoyment these food bring to us when it tastes so good, the type of food that makes us do a little dance inside and verbalize the words ‘Yummy!’ to those around us.
However, when we eat beyond our satiation point, it can quickly reduce the dining pleasure it used to bring us.
And then we force ourselves to eat it to prevent food waste, because after all we had paid a good money for it, surely we can’t just leave portions of it on our table, uneaten.
Uneaten, unappreciated, sad bits of premium food on a shiny dish.
Or if you lived in Asia, it would be leftover clumps of food on a shiny aluminum platter from an Indian restaurant, or bubbling swirling bits of exotic meat in a large clay pot of soup broth, or remnants of tasty mutton curry on a piece of banana leaf.
So what can we do?
My husband and I now share our meals, sometimes swapping our food over to each other midway through our meal. This applied to desserts too, for example, I would order lemon cake while he ordered chocolate or Tiramisu, and then we shared our bites.
So to make dining out worth your money, don’t over-order and overeat, because after you pass that tipping point when your stomach and body says enough is enough, you will regret your meal choices.
And that is a sad situation for all foodies.