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People have for a while speculated that eating while standing up helps you lose some weight, as it burns more calories. However, while it is true that standing up burns more calories than sitting or lying down, research suggests that eating standing up may not actually be the best approach to minimizing your calorie intake and reducing your body mass.
We take our meals and snacks in three different positions: standing up, sitting down, and lying down. (I don’t think anyone ever eats their food kneeling or upside-down, unless you have a pretty weird reason to do so.) People eat standing up when they’re in a hurry, or when they think doing so will help them lose weight, which this article will tell you may not actually be correct. People eat sitting down normally, at a dining or coffee table, or at their desks at work. People eat lying down…well, if they’re feeling lazy, or if they’re literally a baby.
So, which is the best position to eat your food in?
Eating while lying down is not as often practiced today as it was in ancient times. In Ancient Greece and Rome, people in high society were observed to eat their food lying down, either due to sheer laziness, or as a show of power and privilege. Such practice, however, is obviously not the best way to eat your food, as it has been shown to cause heartburn and other digestive problems. In fact, the American College of Gastroenterology advises against lying down immediately after eating for at least two hours to avoid such problems.
Eating while standing up, one the other hand, while healthier than lying down, is said to stress you enough to desensitize your taste buds, robbing your of the degree of pleasure you could get if you ate in essentially any other (reasonable) position (upside-down still not counted).
Other than the minimization of your sensorial appreciation for your food, eating standing up is disadvantageous, for it reportedly compels you to eat more. That’s because in this position, as previously alluded to, you burn more calories, and thus you get tired more quickly, so you try to eat faster when standing up, ultimately resulting in you eating more due to the speed at which you consume your food. The answer, therefore, to the question of whether or not eating standing up helps you lose weight is a resounding no. At least that’s the answer several articles suggest. The best position to eat your food in is, rather, sitting down.
Eating while sitting down keeps you relaxed and less tired than if you were eating standing up, while the posture is just right for you not to develop any digestive problems throughout your meal or after. Consequently, the relaxed feeling and the longer time it takes for you to consume your food both expedite the arrival of the feeling of fullness, allowing you to eat just the right amount of food that you need to replenish the energy that you burned throughout the hours preceding your meal.
In summary, the popular belief that eating standing up will keep or make you thin, several researchers believe, is wrong. The most appropriate position to eat your food in has, after all, just been under our noses, and we’ve been doing it this whole time; it’s as simple as sitting down.