What is Chopstick Diet?

Have you ever heard the “Chopstick diet”? It is quite common in Korea, Japan and today I will introduce about the chopstick diet. If you don’t know how to use the chopstick? Don’t worry! Then it will be more effective for doing the chopstick diet. 🙂

The way of doing Chopstick diet is only using the chopstick during having a meal. There are 3 reasons why the chopstick diet can help you the diet.

1. Eat slow and less

If you use the chopstick, you can control the speed of eating that can eat less and slowly than using spoon, knives and fork. This is because the amount of the food, you can grab with chopstick, is less than the spoon or fork. Also the time of grabbing the food with chopstick is little longer than spoon or fork that you will chew more and eat slower during grabbing. 🙂

 

The reason why eating slowly helps you to eat less is in the body system. After you eat the food, it needs time until the message “I’m full” travel from stomach to brain. Normally it takes 30minutes for the message to arrive to the brain and then you will feel full.

So using the chopstick is good for eating slowly and will help you to eat less. 🙂

2. Eat less salt

In Korean food, soup is always in the dish, and even some of the Korean drink all soup liquid. But there are lots of salt in the soup that it can raise your blood sugar level. Also the salt is the enemy in diet that eating less salt is important to lose weight. If you do the chopstick diet, you can’t drink the soup and only can eat the ingredients in the soup what you can grab.

FYI, in Korea one of the eating etiquette is you should not raise the soup bowl with hand to drink. People only can have a liquid of soup with spoon. This is different from Japanese’s food etiquette that they can drink the soup with hand.

3. The time you feel hungry will come later

Eating pace effect the blood sugar that if you eat the food fast, then your blood sugar will rise sharply. However, once the blood sugar goes down which raised quickly during the eating, the feeling of hunger will come fast. This is because, blood sugar also will go down quickly and then the body will feel nervous that it will make to eat.

4. Food you choose with chopsticks have calories less.

In Korean food spoon is for rice, soup and chopstick is for side dishes. People also eat rice with chopstick, but it is quite hard to pick up the rice with it. Accordingly, if you can only use the chopstick, it will make you to eat less rice and eat more side dishes. The main component of the rice is carbohydrate that eating low amount of carbohydrate is important to do the diet. In my experience, when I only use the chopstick, I tend to eat side dishes more rather than the rice. The good thing is many Korean side dishes are vegi, fish, tofu..etc that these have less calories than the rice.

Why don’t you try the chopstick diet and also learn how to do the chopstick? If you try eating salad, noodles or other food with chopstick, it will help you to eat slowly.

Thanks for reading.:)

Interesting Korean chopstick tools

When you think the Asian people, probably you will suppose they are good at chopstick. Yes it is true. But we are not born with good at chopsticks. Korean usually start learning chopstick when they are 3~4 years old that since that age naturally having practice in every meal. In my case, I got used to the chopstick and did quite well,  when I was 7~8 years old.:)

Today I will introduce about  special chopstick tool which Korean children use when learning the chopstick and also the other kinds of interesting chopstick tool.

4 kinds of Chopstick tools

1) Edison Chopstick 

 

Early 2000s the Korea company get patent of this Edison chopstick. It is  good for training. the chopstick because the rings in the chopstick help for fingers to keep still. The way of using it is put the forefinger and middle finger in each chopstick’s ring.

 

 

However some of the Korean adults are still poor at using  chopstick or the position of using it is not right as below picture. The left position  is not right because the chopstick  is crossed. The right position is holding the chopstick too low that it is not right.

Accordingly, there is Edison chopstick which is for adult.

The way of using it is as same as the children one. Put the forefinger, middle finger in each ring.

 

2) Spoon+Chopstick 

 

Usually the children who are not good at chopstick use  this. When I was in elementary school, some of my friends used and it seemed easy to grab the food.

The way of using it is, when you want to grab the food just use as the tongs, and if you want to eat the soup, make no space between the tools and lift it.

 

 

3) One ring chopstick 

 

When using the  Edison chopstick gets used to it, one ring chopstick is good for next step of practicing the chopstick. It has only one ring that you have to fix the rest of the fingers well. Use when someone is possible to control the power of handling the chopstick and if it is possible to move the fingers quite freely. This is also the popular kinds of the chopstick for kids to practice.

4) Chopstick tongs 

 

 

This chopstick tongs are not common, but it is easy to use it. Especially the one you can see in the picture has both spoon and chopstick. 🙂 If you want to grab the food, use as the tongs and if you want to drink a soup,  grab it in opposite way and use it.

 

 

Thanks for reading and if you want to learn the chopstick, I recommend the Edison chopstick.  🙂