Dress It Up, Eat It Up: Why You Should Always Make Your Food Look Pretty

There is nothing more seductive, more sensual, more mouth- wateringly sexy, than food porn. Admit it, we all have those nights where we can’t help but search through Instagram to find a page that will fulfill our food fantasies because all of the images we see are just so visually and aesthetically pleasing that we can’t help but salivate onto our phone screens. We wish our food looked like that but at the same time we wonder why these people on Instagram put so much effort into making their food look so good? I mean, you are going to scarf it down anyway, so what’s the point? Yes it is mostly for the likes and followers, but by arranging your food like a five-star chef, you can actually improve your eating habits and entire eating experience.

So grab a plate, sit down and arrange your food like an amateur Picasso, because taking the time to make your food look pretty will benefit you in ways you wouldn’t even think of.

It will encourage you to slow down while you are eating

When you spend time putting together a nice meal for yourself, you appreciate and savor it more. But a lot of the time when we get hungry, we open the fridge and quickly eat everything in sight before the thought of grabbing a plate even crosses our minds. Somewhere along the line, people have developed a habit of fast past and on-the-go eating because it’s quick and convenient. However, inhaling your food like an industrial vacuum is not how you should be eating your meals.

Registered Dietitian, Marie Roth says, “ While most people know that eating slowly allows time for the gut and brain to communicate and send us signals to stop eating, most people continue to eat way too quickly anyway. We tend to overeat simply because we haven’t allowed adequate time for this hormonal cross-talk to occur.”

Roth says that fast eating leads to undesired weight gain and can contribute to poor chewing, which not many people know is a critical component of our digestion process. “Poor chewing can cause digestive discomfort or complaints, it reduces the amount of nutrients we can absorb from foods, and can result in intestinal bacterial overgrowths.” says Roth.

Eating should be a relaxed time of your day so by taking the time to create a nice and pretty meal, you are forcing yourself to slow down and you are allowing your digestive system to do it’s job.

A photo posted by Jenny Meyers (@healthy_fit_delicious) on Apr 28, 2015 at 7:36am PDT

You Will Enjoy Your Meal More

It’s no secret that the booming success of the culinary world stems from the presentation of food and quality of the dining experiences customers get. You don’t go out to eat to be served food that has been slapped on a plate with no rhyme or reason. The visual experience you get with your meal contributes to how you much you enjoy it and even how good it tastes. When we see something that looks pretty, such as our favorite #foodporn accounts on Instagram, our minds have already decided that it probably tastes as good as it looks. Also, laying all your food out on your plate before you eat it can help better satisfy your hunger. When you are standing in front of the fridge picking away at random things, you aren’t allowing your brain to send cues to your stomach that you are full. Actually seeing your entire meal on your plate will tell your brain, “Okay this is what I am eating and then I am done.”

A photo posted by Jenny Meyers (@healthy_fit_delicious) on Feb 25, 2015 at 10:53am PST

You Learn Portion Control

Portion control is something that many people struggle with. Portion control is understanding serving sizes of food. When you don’t take the time to put your food on an actual plate, you really have no idea how much you are eating because you don’t see it all together. Your plate should be split into three sections (vegetables, starches and proteins) but a lot of the times people just blob everything together. When you want to make your meals look pretty you organize them in a way where you don’t have food falling off the sides or piled on top of each other, because it’s not aesthetically pleasing.

Now we don’t all have to be Instagram professional chefs or take pictures of food. But we should all take the time to sit down and make a nice plate of food look pretty for our own eating experiences. Eating should be something to look forward to and enjoy, instead of just a rushed necessity. So go and get your favorite foods and prep them in a way that puts the Mona Lisa to shame.