Great-grandma was a liar

Lawrence Toppman: 

When I was 10, my mom's grandmother came to live with us. She was a lovely woman so old that her first sweetheart had gone off to fight in the Spanish-American War, and she was full of 19th-century wisdom -- much of it still valid, but some of it far-fetched. She believed that, if you chewed each bite 50 times, you would eat so slowly that you would feel full and never want to overindulge.

Because I belong to a family of pudge-pots, I tested this theory and learned two things: Any bite of food, even one the size of a baby's fist, is reduced to a pulpy and unappealing mass if masticated more than 20 times. And I was just as hungry when I finished as I had been when I ate normally. (On the other hand, I learned that 50 chews was the right number for the ideally wet, disgusting spitball blown through a straw in study hall.)

The truth is, nothing makes me want food less except being full. So the trick is not to achieve some kind of zen state where my desire to overeat dwindles; it's to live with that longing and accept the idea it must go unfulfilled. As Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy said when asked how he could hold his fingers over a lit candle, "The trick is not minding." That's a trick I'm still mastering.