Eating a jar of peanut butter a day isn’t easy. I got pretty good at it after a month, though, at least as good as I felt I was going to get. Here’s what helped me:
- Start early, as in right when you get up. Getting protein early in the day is a great way to build muscle while reducing how much fat you put on.
- Spread it throughout the day. The first day I tried this, I ate about 2/3 of a jar in one marathon because I needed to get it down before bed. You can’t keep this up. It will affect your sleep, your ability to eat anything the next day, and so on.
- Eat large scoops. It’s way easier psychologically to eat 12 large spoonfuls than 30 normal spoonfuls.
- Lick the spoon – don’t bite it. This is for efficiency. If you get peanut butter on your teeth, you’ll end up having to lick it off anyway. Save yourself the step.
- Keep the peanut butter on your tongue and away from the sides of your mouth as much as possible. The trick to getting the peanut butter down is allowing the saliva in your mouth to break down the peanut butter so you can swallow it. If you clog the pores in you mouth with peanut butter, they can’t do their job. Best to leave as many open as much as possible.
- Swallow it – don’t chew it. The longer it’s in your mouth, the more saliva you’re using, which means less saliva for your next bite. Eventually it adds up (or subtracts away, depending on how you think of it).
- Drink water but not too much. You need to keep your throat lubricated for all the swallowing, but you don’t want to fill stomach up on water.
- Stay on top of it. It’s easier to eat one or two spoons every few hours throughout the day than try to polish off a whole jar in one shot. You’ll get better results too if you give your body a chance to absorb the peanut butter instead of having to process it as quickly as possible.
- Don’t transfer the peanut butter out of its original container. On week 1, I started transferring the peanut butter into old jars so I would only have to carry half a jar at a time, even if I’d just opened a new jar. I struggled through a week of this before I realized that transferring the peanut butter changed its consistency, making it more sticky and as a result harder to swallow quickly.
Yeah, so it’s one of those skills you never thought you needed to know. But hey, you never know when it’ll totally come in handy.
