This extra chapter was cut from The Journey Back to keep the book focused. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping. Any $17 PDF-and-audiobook bundle is a separate optional digital add-on, not the price of the paperback.
Jeni’s did not teach me that I loved food.
I had always loved food.
My grandmother was an amazing cook, and I grew up knowing what genuinely good food tasted like. I enjoyed her cooking. I enjoyed restaurants. I enjoyed snacks. Taste had never been missing from my life.
What had been missing was attention.
There is a difference between liking the taste of food and staying with the experience long enough to taste it fully.
I had always been a fast eater. That was simply part of who I thought I was. I did not sit down and decide to rush through meals. I ate quickly without thinking about it.
The plate would arrive. I would begin eating. A few minutes later, the food would be gone, and I would return to whatever I considered the real purpose of the day.
Usually, that meant work.
Food was something I did so I could get back to the thing I believed mattered more.
After my diabetes diagnosis, I read research suggesting that people who report eating quickly are more likely to develop type 2 diabetes. That does not prove fast eating causes diabetes. People who eat quickly may differ in many other ways, and much of the research is observational.
But I recognized myself in the pattern.
I had spent years eating so quickly that I gave myself very little opportunity to notice when enjoyment was fading or satisfaction was arriving. By the time my body and mind could enter the conversation, I had often finished everything in front of me.
The Jeni’s experience made that visible because I did the opposite.
I dragged the spoon slowly across the ice cream. I noticed the coldness, the texture, the peach flavor, the smell, and the way it melted. I remained with one small serving for close to thirty minutes.
For the first time, I saw the entire arc of pleasure.
The anticipation was enormous. The first taste was wonderful. The following tastes were good. Then, little by little, I was repeating an experience whose most intense moment had already passed.
When I used to inhale food, I never stayed with it long enough to see that curve. Wanting, tasting, swallowing, and reaching for more happened so quickly that they felt like one continuous command.
Jeni’s put space between them.
Afterward, I began trying to create that space during ordinary meals.
I started noticing what happened before food ever reached my mouth.
How did it look on the plate?
What happened when the edge of the fork pressed into it?
Was it crisp, soft, dense, flaky, juicy, fibrous, or creamy?
What did my tongue experience first?
How did the texture change as I chewed?
What aroma reached me before the flavor did?
What remained after I swallowed?
Those may sound like obvious questions. To me, they were almost new.
I had used my mouth to eat for my entire life, but I had rarely used it to pay attention.
I had chewed only enough to move food from the plate to my stomach. I had not thought of chewing as part of the experience.
I told myself that chewing more thoroughly probably made the meal easier on my body. Chewing does perform the first mechanical work of breaking food down, but I do not want to turn my experience into a medical prescription or pretend that slowing down can correct diabetes by itself.
The practical change was simpler.
Slowing down gave me time to experience what I was eating and a better opportunity to recognize satisfaction before I raced past it.
It also changed the way I thought about texture.
By then, I had stopped eating foods such as mashed potatoes as part of the plan I was following. In my own mind, I sometimes described a very soft food like mashed potatoes as almost ‘pre-chewed’ because it required so little work to eat quickly.
That was a personal metaphor, not a scientific definition and not a declaration that nobody should eat mashed potatoes. I was noticing something specific about myself.
The easier a food was for me to consume without thinking, the more likely I was to eat it rapidly.
Foods with more structure forced me to participate. Broccoli, okra, salmon, eggs, seaweed, nuts, and the other foods I had built into my routine did not all feel the same. They had resistance, layers, temperature, moisture, and contrast.
When I slowed down enough to notice those differences, a meal stopped feeling like a nutritional assignment.
It became an experience.
That mattered when I ate away from home too.
With Nothing Held Back, meals in Charlotte have often been part of coaching, business, and relationship building. We may choose a very nice restaurant because the environment and the table are part of the business decision. Even outside those events, I have always liked eating at good places.
Yet one of my struggles with eating out was that much of the food had begun to taste similar to me.
Many restaurants buy through major distributors such as Sysco or US Foods. Menus may describe different steaks, chicken dishes, sauces, and sides, but after years of eating out, I often felt that the range of actual experiences was narrower than the menus made it sound.
That is my personal perception, not a claim that every restaurant serves the same food.
But after Jeni’s, I began to wonder how much of the sameness belonged to the restaurant and how much belonged to the way I was eating.
If I carried the same work-focused mind into every dining room, ate at the same speed, and barely noticed what happened between the first bite and the empty plate, I was flattening every meal into the same experience.
I could sit in a beautiful restaurant and still eat as if I were standing over the kitchen counter between phone calls.
The room changed.
The menu changed.
The price changed.
But I had not changed.
I was still hurrying through the meal to get back to something else.
Slowing down made me more aware of what actually distinguished one dish from another. Sometimes the difference was the ingredient. Sometimes it was the cooking method. Sometimes it was temperature, texture, seasoning, aroma, or presentation.
I also realized how little I had explored seasoning in my own cooking.
For years, I might use Old Bay, salt, or pepper, but I did not think deeply about building flavor. Food either tasted good on its own, or it did not. I had not spent much time asking what garlic, herbs, heat, fat, acid, or a different cooking technique could do to a basic ingredient.
Once I began paying attention, seasoning stopped looking like decoration.
It was part of the experience.
A basic food could become several different meals depending on how I prepared it. The same ingredient could be crisp or soft, mild or sharp, smoky or bright. I did not need an endless catalog of new foods to create variety. I needed to become more aware of what I was doing with the food already in front of me.
I saw that clearly over the weekend when I cooked steaks for Brandy and Jill.
I bought the steaks at Food Lion and found help with a method that would give them a good sear while keeping the centers pink. I seasoned them before they went into a very hot pan, seared them, then added approximately two tablespoons of grass-fed butter, two freshly crushed cloves of garlic, and additional seasoning near the end.
The pan was hot.
The outside of the meat developed color.
The butter melted around the steaks and carried the garlic through the pan.
The smell changed as everything came together.
I was not simply waiting for the food to be done. I was watching the transformation.
I wanted the steaks to look beautiful. I wanted the outside browned and the inside medium-rare. I wanted Brandy and Jill to see the plate and become excited before they took the first bite.
That was another realization.
A meal begins before the fork reaches the mouth.
We eat first with anticipation, then with our eyes, then with aroma, texture, temperature, and taste. The nutritional content matters, but it is not the only thing a person experiences when eating.
Brandy and Jill both said those were the best steaks I had ever cooked.
I tasted one too, and I had to agree that it was a very good steak.
It had not come from some rare source or an extravagant restaurant. It was a grocery-store steak prepared with attention.
The care changed the result.
The moment connected back to what I had learned at Jeni’s.
Attention did not only change how much I noticed while eating. It changed how I cooked, how I served food, and what I believed made a meal special.
Before, I thought variety required constantly searching for a different restaurant or a different food.
Now I could see that basic ingredients could produce distinct experiences when I changed the seasoning, texture, heat, presentation, and pace.
That gave me another way to live within the structure I had created after the hospital without making food feel monotonous.
I could make food fit my goals and still make it worth tasting.
I could prepare something simple and give it enough care that my wife and daughter called it the best version I had ever made.
I could eat more slowly and discover that a meal contained details I had missed for decades.
I would love to say that this immediately taught me to stop eating before everything on the plate was gone.
That would not be honest.
I am a volume eater, and I still often finished what I served myself. Part of my strategy was deliberately building meals from foods that allowed me to eat a satisfying volume while staying within the plan I was following.
The first change was not necessarily that I left food on the plate.
It was that I stopped leaving the meal before the plate was empty.
Before, my body sat at the table while my mind was already back at the computer. I could finish a meal without remembering much about the middle of it.
Now I was present long enough to notice the beginning, the middle, and the end.
That presence gave me information.
I could notice when hunger had softened.
I could notice when the strongest pleasure had passed.
I could notice whether I was still eating because the food tasted extraordinary, because food remained on the plate, or because my hand had not received instructions to stop.
Noticing did not guarantee that I would stop every time. It gave me a moment in which stopping became possible.
That moment had rarely existed when I ate like a vacuum cleaner.
Slowing down did not make every meal extraordinary either.
Sometimes food was simply food. Sometimes a restaurant dish that sounded special was ordinary. Sometimes the healthiest meal I could make was not going to compete with my grandmother’s cooking or Brandy’s homemade ice cream.
But attention helped me tell the difference.
I no longer had to consume the entire plate at full speed while hoping the next bite would become more rewarding than the last one.
I could taste what was actually there.
I could appreciate it when it was good.
I could recognize when it was merely acceptable.
I could learn from it when I cooked.
And I could stop demanding that food provide comfort, stimulation, and escape before I had even given it the opportunity to be a meal.
My grandmother had shown me long ago that food could carry beauty, care, and pleasure. I had never forgotten how good her cooking tasted.
What I had forgotten was that receiving those things required time.
For years, I said I loved food while rushing past almost everything food had to offer.
I tasted enough to want the next bite, but not slowly enough to understand the one I was eating.
After Jeni’s, I began learning how to remain in the experience.
The meal was no longer only fuel for work or a shortcut away from an uncomfortable feeling.
It could be color on a plate, resistance against a fork, garlic in a hot pan, butter foaming around a steak, the first cool taste of peach, or the expression on Brandy’s and Jill’s faces when something I cooked turned out better than they expected.
Food had always contained those moments.
I had simply been eating too fast to receive them.
The first change was not portion control.
It was attention.
For most of my life, I used food to leave the moment.
Now I was learning to taste my way into it.
Want to see how I connected the dots?
I wrote The Journey Back to share my experience and explain the Four Metabolic Loads framework. The physical paperback is $12.95 with free U.S. shipping.
→ See The Journey Back Paperback ($12.95)
Educational only, not medical advice. Charles’s experience was alongside physician-supervised care and prescribed medication. Individual results vary. Talk to your doctor.
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