I don’t really know how I became such a fast eater, but I’ve always scarfed my food for as long as I remember. Maybe it started in the early years with all the fast food dinners in the car on the way to my mom’s next appointment, or the time spent later as a busy restaurant manager eating on the fly before the next rush hit. It could have been perpetuated by the time I spent as a stay-at-home mom, being the last one to eat and trying to shovel it all in before it got cold or someone needed something. For whatever reason, I breathed in my food like air and I breathed in a lot of it. Unfortunately for my waistline, I didn’t really make the connection between the velocity with which I ate and the amount of food that I ate until my mid-20s.

Strike that.

What I should really say is that I chose not to pay attention to the connection. I completely ignored it because being hungry sucked and I was unwilling to wait the 20 minutes for the “I’m full” signal to reach my brain from my stomach. Screw signals. I needed food and I needed food now.

So what got my attention and made me want to slow down, besides plain out being fed up with being fat? Well, I choked. On a tortilla chip. And I don’t mean the coughing, sputtering, “hey, do you mind handing me that glass of water” kind of choking. I’d had plenty of those episodes already, and yes they were embarrassing, and yes they made me chew my food a bit more meticulously for the rest of the meal. But this time was different. I’m talking a completely-blocked-airway-and-spots-in-my-vision kind of choking.

I remember being alone in my kitchen, clutching the counter and sinking to the floor, thinking “so this is how I die: a fat girl choking on a Dorito” (I also remember looking down at the floor and thinking that it needed to be mopped, and that I didn’t want the people who found my corpse to think that I was a bad housekeeper, but that’s beside the point). The congruence of the situation wasn’t lost on me, even in my death throes. After a few more frightening seconds, the chip eventually got soft and dislodged itself and I took the singularly most gratifying breath of air in my life. I sat there for a good ten minutes just breathing, thinking about how close I’d come to an obituary that read like a punchline.

I decided right then and there that I was going to change my eating habits and pay more attention to what I ate and how I ate it. It was time for a little mindful eating: a topic around which quite a few articles and blog posts have been constructed lately, and for good reason. Mindful eating can completely change your relationship with food, and I’ve listed a few of the tactics that helped me the most.

I sat down next to my hunger.

Irritability and impatience were my trademark symptoms of an empty fuel tank. In a world of drive-thrus and instant gratification, I’d become conditioned to expect my needs to be met right away. When they weren’t, I got snippy.

But my cranky response to feeling hunger wasn’t just a drop in blood sugar levels or an adult version of a temper tantrum. By being so impatient, I’d actually lowered my threshold for pain and discomfort. Hunger felt bad, and I had forgotten how to tolerate it. Through mindfulness, I brought awareness to this conditioned intolerance and observed it. I looked at my hunger and my hunger looked at me, and after a few stare-downs, we were okay with each other.

2. I identified my triggers and took the “auto” out of my “pilot.”

Once I actually started paying attention to what I ate and how fast I ate it, I picked up on a few patterns in my behavior. Anything from how many hours I’d gone between meals, to the temperature of my food affected how quickly or how mindfully I ate. For example, I noticed that I was more likely to inhale my food if it was something messy, like a hamburger. It was the “ice cream cone” mentality: if something was starting to drip, I fixed it by taking a bite in that area. Before I knew it, I’d “fixed” my entire entree while my companions were only halfway through. By figuring out my quirks, I could then figure out what works, which leads me to my next tactic.

3. I used utensils- with everything.

Yep, candy bars included. I know, I know, how very Seinfeld-esque. But using utensils forced me to eat slower and pay more attention to what I was eating. I began consciously cutting actual bite-sized pieces of food instead of shoveling it in by the heapful, and I put the fork down in between thoroughly-chewed bites. This not only enabled me to better taste my food, but also gave my body time to feel full before I over-stuffed myself. Win-win.

4. I sat still and ate “pretty.”

Sharing a meal with a friend over some wine and good conversation is a wonderful thing, but I realized that even when I ate alone, I almost never paid attention to my food. I always had a screen in front of me or a book in my hand, and I only spared an occasional glance at my plate when my fork couldn’t find its target. I was just eating as a means to end, and I wasn’t experiencing my meals. So I put away the gadgets and focused on my food: the smell, the taste, the weight of each bite on my tongue. I even paid attention to the feeling of anticipation that I got before each bite, and what it was like when that feeling abated each time. I paid attention to the color, the texture, and the arrangement on my plate… my pretty plate. Even when I order takeout, I rearrange my goods on nice dishes and use garnishes. It’s been proven that presentation makes food taste better, and I eat with my eyes as much as the next person. I made each meal into its own event.

Being fully present at my meals helped me cut my body weight by almost half and I’ve kept it off for almost a decade, but I’m not perfect. There are still times that I look up from my cleared plate to see an astonished look on my fiancé’s face, but I don’t give myself an internal lecture about it. I learn from it and laugh it off, because that’s what life is all about anyway.