Why Eating Well is More Than Just What You Eat: A Mindful Eating Tip
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.
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:
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Eat slowly and don’t rush your meals
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Chew thoroughly
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Eliminate distractions by turning off the TV and putting down your phone
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Eat in silence
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Focus on how the food makes you feel
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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.
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:
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Eating on autopilot or while multitasking
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Eating to fill a void like stress or depression
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Eating junk or comfort food
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Eating food as quickly as possible
The signs of mindful eating can be any or all of the following:
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Focusing all of your attention on food and the experience of eating
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Eating only to satisfy physical hunger
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Eating nutritionally healthy meals and snacks
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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.
What you need in order to eat good
While it is absolutely important to know how to nourish yourself well and get the nutrients your body needs to feel and function its best, that alone won’t help you create healthy eating habits that you can maintain for life. If it did, then no one would ever struggle with eating well on a daily basis. Everyone would simply know exactly what to eat and eat perfectly 100% of the time, but of course, we’ve all experienced that’s not the case.
Even when you know what to eat to nourish your body, it can be challenging to maintain it when there are so many other factors that play into your eating habits. If you’re putting too much emphasis on eating perfectly, it can keep you in the start-stop cycle. This cycle means you’re able to eat well for a certain amount of time, but then you fall off the bandwagon whenever something influences your food choices like:
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going out to eat
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celebrating the holidays
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feeling really stressed or bored
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having your regular routine thrown of
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being “tempted” by a sweet treat a coworker brought to the office
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getting bored of the same meals every week
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not having enough time to cook after work
And the list can go on and on. I’m sure you can think of one or two things that you’ve experienced that prevented you from sticking with your healthy eating habits.
We’ve all been there, and that’s why it’s so important to give equal attention to how you’re eating. The ‘how’ you’re eating side of things is all about learning to navigate all of the other factors that influence your food choices. And we do this by practicing mindful eating.
Slowing down and bringing more mindful awareness to what you’re eating and how you’re feeling before, during and after meals is one of the best practices you can have for finding what works for you and creating healthy eating habits. And the best part is, this type of practice helps you practice balance, so you can enjoy all foods without feeling out of control or overeating them.
Being more mindful about how you eat
Hre are a few tips to get you started with a mindful eating practice that can help you create this intentional balance with your eating habits that will make it possible for you to eat well on a daily basis.
Check-In With Yourself Before and After Meals
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Before and after eating, stop and ask yourself, “How do I feel?”. Determine if you’re hungry or full, relaxed, stressed or emotional. By doing this, you can also determine why it is that you’re eating. Ideally, we’re only eating when we’re hungry, but this isn’t always the case. By practicing this self-check-in, over time you can become self-aware and better understand your relationship with food. You can develop the habit of being mindful of your food and eating habits.
Remove All Distractions
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Mealtime distractions can quickly take away the mindfulness of eating. Take some time to actively think about all of the distractions you generally have while eating. This may be your phone, tv or even work tasks during your lunch hour. Remove these distractions and really focus on just eating. This brings the attention back to your meal and you’ll be much more likely to acknowledge and notice your hunger, satiety, taste and the overall experience of your meals.
Eat Your Meals at The Table
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Along those lines, the next tip is to eat at the table. Sitting at the table is a great practice, especially since so many of us can get accustomed to eating at our desks or eating on the couch. By simply dedicating your table or counter, wherever you eat, to actually eating, you’re using your environment to train your brain and recognize that it’s time to slow down and eat.
Make the Experience a 10 on Your Satisfaction Scale
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Make the experience a 10 on your satisfaction scale as much as possible. Whether you’re going to make a nutrient-dense nourish meal or enjoy a sweet dessert, think about how you can make it as satisfying to you as possible. This works especially well if you previously tried to avoid certain foods. Instead, give yourself permission to enjoy them, but be very intentional about how you enjoy them. It’s little shifts, like enjoying your favorite homemade baked goods on the weekend, that can really transform your thinking around your experience with food.
Nourish Your Body Well
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Another mindful eating practice is to nourish your body and make your meals tastier by eating a variety of foods. We’re meant to experience our food; the way the food tastes, how it feels, what it looks like and how it smells all contribute to the experience of eating. When we engage all of our senses and really experience our food, we’re mindful and present at that moment.
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:
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It can let you know when you’re turning to food for reasons other than hunger
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It can give you a greater pleasure from the foods you’re eating
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It can help you make healthier choices about the foods you eat and put into your body
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It can make you feel fuller sooner, and you will eat less
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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.
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.
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
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Ask yourself why you’re eating, whether you’re truly hungry, and whether the food you chose is healthy.
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Try taking a few deep breaths before eating a meal or snack to quietly contemplate what you’re about to put into your body.
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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.
