Everything You Need To Know About Mindful Eating
What is mindful eating?
Mindful eating is based on mindfulness, a Buddhist concept. Mindfulness is a form of meditation that helps you recognize and cope with your emotions and physical sensations. Mindful eating is about using mindfulness to reach a state of full attention to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating.
A more in-depth definition would be that mindful eating is maintaining an in-the-moment awareness of the food and drink you put into your body. It involves observing how the food makes you feel and the signals your body sends about taste, satisfaction, and fullness. Mindful eating requires you to simply acknowledge and accept rather than judge the feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations you observe. It can extend to the process of buying, preparing, and serving your food as well as consuming it.
Mindful eating isn’t about being perfect, always eating the right things, or never allowing yourself to eat on the go again. And it’s not about establishing strict rules for how many calories you can eat or which foods you have to include or avoid in your diet. Rather, it’s about focusing all your senses and being present as you shop for, cook, serve, and eat your food.
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Why you should try it
In today’s world, distractions have shifted our attention away from the actual act of eating and more toward televisions, computers, and smartphones. Eating has become a mindless act for many, and is often done quickly. Some may find themselves eating in the car commuting to work, at the desk in front of a computer screen, or on the couch watching TV. When you eat mindlessly, you’re usually shoveling food down regardless of whether you’re still hungry or not. And sometimes mindless eating can be an emotional response rather than a physical response to your hunger.
Mindless eating vs. Mindful eating
When it comes to eating it’s important to know how to distinguish mindless eating and mindful eating. And if you regularly eat mindlessly, finding the difference between the two might be a little more difficult. But there are clues you can look for to help tell the two apart.
The signs of mindless eating can be any or all of the following:
Eating on autopilot or while multitasking
Eating to fill a void like stress or depression
Eating junk or comfort food
Eating food as quickly as possible
The signs of mindful eating can be any or all of the following:
Focusing all of your attention on food and the experience of eating
Eating only to satisfy physical hunger
Eating nutritionally healthy meals and snacks
Eating slowly and savoring every bite
Mindful eating can also help you distinguish between emotional and physical hunger, which can increase your awareness of food-related triggers and gives you the freedom to choose your response to them.
Benefits of mindful eating
Being mindful of the food you eat can promote better digestion, keep you full with less food, and influence wiser choices about what you eat in the future. It can also help you free yourself from unhealthy habits around food and eating. In addition, mindful eating can also help with some of the following:
It can let you know when you’re turning to food for reasons other than hunger
It can give you a greater pleasure from the foods you’re eating
It can help you make healthier choices about the foods you eat and put into your body
It can make you feel fuller sooner, and you will eat less
It can let you eat in a healthier, more balanced way.
Mindful eating can help you to avoid overeating, make it easier to change your dietary habits for the better, and enjoy the improved well-being that comes with a healthier diet. It can also help with eating disorders as well.
Mindful eating & Eating disorders
Mindful eating can help prevent eating disorders like binge eating and emotional eating. Binge eating involves eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, mindlessly and without control and emotional eating involves letting your feelings dictate when you’re hungry and what you want to eat, even if you are not physically hungry. Mindful eating may drastically reduce the severity and frequency of both binge eating and emotional eating episodes.
Filling and saturating yourself with food can help mask what you’re really hungry for, but only for a short time. And then the real hunger or need will return. Mindful eating gives you the skills you need to deal with these impulses. It puts you in charge of your responses instead of at the whim of your instinct.
How to practice mindful eating
In order to practice mindfulness, you need to participate in an activity with total awareness. So when it comes to mindful eating, you’ll want to eat with all your attention rather than on autopilot or while you’re doing something else. Here are a few simple steps to get started with mindful eating, with each step having powerful benefits of their own:
Eat slowly and don’t rush your meals
Chew thoroughly
Eliminate distractions by turning off the TV and putting down your phone
Eat in silence
Focus on how the food makes you feel
Stop eating when you’re full
Try practicing mindful eating for short, five-minute periods at first and gradually build up from there. You can also begin mindful eating when you’re making your shopping list or browsing the menu at a restaurant, it doesn’t have to start when you’re already eating.
Top 5 mindful eating tips
When it comes to mindful eating, it really is such an important skill because it helps to support weight management, emotional regulation and just overall enjoyment of food in general. So here are AK’s top 5 tips when it comes to mindful eating.
1.use all 5 senses when eating
You want to make sure that you are really smelling and tasting the food you’re eating. Think about and feel into the environment that you’re eating in, and take a good look at the food you’re eating. Look at the colors and its shape and really let all of that sink in. This really helps to slow things down and make you feel like you’re a part of the experience. And that it’s not something you’re just doing to get to an end goal, but something that you’re experiencing.
2.know your motivation for eating
This is super important, though it may take a little time to really train and build up this skill. But you want to get into your body and ask yourself ‘Am I hungry physically?’ ‘Do I feel the physical sensations of hunger?’ ‘Or is this hunger coming from something more emotional?’ By asking yourself these questions, you should be able to determine if you’re craving more of an emotional fullness rather than a physical one. This is something that takes courage and willingness, but also takes time.
3.eat until you’re not hungry anymore, not until you’re full
This one is a big shift. A lot of times when we’re eating, we don’t realize that we’re done until we’re stuffed but you should be eating until you’re not hungry. By doing this you get that sensation type of mind, knowing what it feels like to not be hungry. You can ask yourself that question through this.
4.keep your portion size appropriate
You want to keep your portions within reason. So women will want to eat about 3-4 ounces of protein, where as men can have about 4-6 ounces of protein. In regards to other portions, you’ll want to have about 1/3 - 1/2 cup of greens, and about a cup of non-starchy raw vegetables or 1/2 cup of starchy vegetables.
5.GRATITUDE practice
You’ll want to practice gratitude by showing your appreciation for the food, and even possibly saying it to the food. Mindful eating is about appreciating your food and savoring it, saying what it is about the food that you enjoy. And it’s good to be specific, like if you were telling a friend or a loved what it is that you appreciate about them.
By doing these steps with your food, you will find that mindful eating can really be something that helps you and supports you. Whether that’s in the moment or in your life in general.
Lifestyles that would benefit from mindful eating
While anyone can benefit from mindful eating, there are certain lifestyles that would greatly benefit from it more than others. Once you recognize that you fall within one of these lifestyles, you can begin your mindful eating journey and be one step closer to a healthy lifestyle. However if you don’t relate with one of these lifestyles, you might find that you could still benefit from eating mindfully.
External eaters
Those who are external eaters, or eat due to factors other than physical hunger, would greatly benefit from mindful eating. External eaters typically eat in response to environmental, food related cues, such as the sight or smell of food. This type of lifestyle might be all too familiar with mindless eating because the external food cues act as a distraction when they are going to eat.
No hunger cues
Those who have no hunger cues, or are not in tune to their hunger cues, would greatly benefit from mindful eating. When you don’t have hunger cues, not only is it extremely difficult to tell when you are actually hunger, but it also makes it difficult to recognize when you are full. This type of lifestyle might be familiar with mindless eating because they may continue to eat, even though they are full, and this could be due to their lack of hunger cues, distractions or both.
Chronic stress
Those who have chronic stress, or who find everything they do or that happens to them stressful, would greatly benefit from mindful eating. Dealing with constant stress not only takes a toll on your body and mind, but it can also change your eating patterns too. This type of lifestyle might be familiar with mindless eating because when some are overly stress they often turn to food as a way to cope with the feeling.
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Mindful eating is a powerful tool to regain control of your eating. It can help with eating disorders or even those who just wish to eat more mindfully. Remember that mindful eating takes practice and patience, and try to eat more slowly, chew thoroughly, remove distractions, and stop eating when you’re full.
Extra tips for mindful eating
Ask yourself why you’re eating, whether you’re truly hungry, and whether the food you chose is healthy.
Try taking a few deep breaths before eating a meal or snack to quietly contemplate what you’re about to put into your body.
Ask yourself how well the food you’re eating makes you feel after you’ve eaten it. How much better do you feel after eating? How much more energy and enthusiasm do you have after a meal or snack? Asking these questions can be extremely helpful.
