How to Apply Mindful Eating In Your Daily Life

By: Sanders Legendre

Mindful Eating gives you the benefit of reduced food intake, less stress, and more enjoyment when you eat just by becoming aware of the thoughts that you have around food. If you want to put mindful eating in practice and use it everyday it is beneficial for you to have your own mindful eating routine. A mindful eating routine is just a series of actions that you do every meal to remind yourself to be aware when you eat. In this article I will do a deep dive on why you need a mindful eating routine in your life, how to apply mindful eating practices when you eat, and how to develop your own mindful eating routine from scratch.

Why You Need A Mindful Eating Routine

Mindful Eating has a number of benefits such as reduced cravings, reduced food intake, increased enjoyment of food, reduced stress, and less binge eating. Mindful Eating can also be practiced anytime, anywhere, and with every food that you eat.

There are plenty of resources that exist out there that explain what mindful eating is but not how to put it in practice. So this article will answer this single question for you “How do I eat mindfully?”

Mindful Eating is simply the act of becoming aware of your thoughts around eating.

It sounds like something that is easy to do but the reality is that we make hundreds of food decisions every day.

• Every time we walk into the kitchen
• Every time we go to the checkout line
• Every time we go to the grocery store
• Every time we drive past a fast food restaurant
• Every time we think about the delivery app on our phones

How many times have you made the decision to get some candy or snacks at the checkout line, grab a snack from the fridge, or get some food from the drive through without actually knowing whether or not you are hungry?

When you have a mindful eating routine you remind yourself to become aware of all of the thoughts that you are having about food in order to make an informed and intentional decision on whether or not to eat.

A Mindful Eating Routine is a set of actions that someone performs before, during, and after they eat to remind oneself to stay mindful and make mindful choices.

Usually you would want these routines to be short and easy so that you can practice them at every meal.

If you want to apply mindful eating in your life it is important for you to develop mindful eating routines that fit into your own lifestyle.

Before you develop your own routine I believe it is important to experience mindful eating using one of the many mindful eating exercises.

The purpose of these exercises is to have you experience the shift that mindful eating has on you when you eat.

I believe that the best way to get started in mindful eating is to do a few mindful eating exercises and take the most impactful things from those experiences and do those everytime that you eat.

"When you have a mindful eating routine you remind yourself to become aware of all of the thoughts that you are having about food in order to make an informed and intentional decision on whether or not to eat. "

Mindful Eating Exercises

A Mindful Eating Exercise is a specific set of mindful actions designed to get you to experience what mindful eating is all about.

There are a number of different mindful eating exercises that you can start doing the next time you eat

There are five different mindful eating exercises that I researched for this article. I think these exercises do a good job of walking beginners through the mindful eating experience.

Remember that it is up to you to take the most compelling parts of the exercises and find a way to fit them into your daily life.

Raisin Exercise: The raisin exercise, discovered by Jon Kabat Zinn is the most popular mindful eating exercise. This exercise teaches you how your eating experience changes when you use all five senses. You practice using all of your senses on a single raisin.

Here is how you perform the raisin exercise :

• See: Examine every part of the raisin with care and attention. Take the time to examine its shape, color, texture. You might even want to put it in the light to see how it changes.
• Feel: You want to close your eyes to enhance your senses and touch the raisin carefully. Put it between your fingers and move it around. Notice the textures and characteristics that it has.
• Smell: Hold the raisin close to your nose. Inhale the aroma of the raisin. Notice how your body changes as the smell of the raisin enters.
• Taste: Put the raisin in your mouth. Take the time to notice how the taste changes every time that you bite. Also notice how much the taste changes when you
• Listen: After you are done tasting the raisin you want to take a moment to hear how the raisin sounds as you chew it.

Two Plate Approach: This mindful eating exercise comes from a book called Discover Mindful Eating. This approach is best used when you are in a restaurant and you cannot control your portions.

This is how to do the two plate method:

1. Grab two plates: a serving plate and an eating plate. Fill up that serving plate with the food you plan to eat.
2. Take some of the food from the serving plate and put it on the eating plate. Only put as much as you are going to eat at the moment.
3. Eat what is on your eating plate with slow and mindful bites
4. When you are done eating ask yourself if you need more. If you are hungry repeat the same steps over again,

Mindful Eating Worksheet: The Mindful Eating Worksheet can work well with kids but it is also designed for people of all ages to practice. The worksheet is divided into four different section

1. The first section reminds us to be mindful by thinking about "how your food tastes, sounds, feels, and smells. You are prompted to eat a piece of fruit and write down your reflections afterwards.
2. The next section gives you space to write how the different senses interact with what you eat. You must write down how the food tastes, looks, smells, feels and/or sounds.
3. In the third section you must write down what you noticed that you have not noticed before. Here you write down new experiences or perspectives that you learned while doing the mindful eating practice.
4. In the fourth and final section you must draw a picture of the fruit and all the things that it needed to grow. This exercise helps you to reflect and the process it took for the food to get on your plate.

Mindful Eating Plate: This mindful eating exercise from Dr. Susan Albers, an expert in mindful eating.

In this exercise you split your plate into four equal sections. When you eat from that section of your plate you switch your awareness to that mindful experience

The plate sections are the following:

• Observe: Take observation of your body signals. Is your stomach rumbling? How are your energy levels? Are you stressed? Are you satisfied? Are you full?
• Savor: Fully enjoy what you are eating. Notice the texture, aroma, and flavor.
• In-The-Moment: Be fully present. Remove all distractions, sit down, and eat
• Nonjudgement: Notice when guilt enters your mind. Stay mindful.

There is also another section for a drink if you have one:

• Aware: Do not eat mindlessly, fully taste what you eat.

I encourage you to try at least one of these exercises to demonstrate how your outlook on eating changes then you practice mindful eating.

Mindful Eating Routines

Now that you have been introduced to mindful exercises, it is important to take the most relevant parts of those exercises in order to create your own Mindful Eating Routine.

For example, if you find that splitting your food between two plates really helps you control your hunger you might want to make it a routine to practice and adjust it however you need to in order to get it to work for you.

You might even make it easier on yourself by diving the food that you have on a single plate but performing the same steps. This is an example of taking something from a mindful eating exercise and creating a mindful routine from it.

The main purpose of developing your own routines is to take something that you can practice almost every time that you eat.

A good routine should be easily repeatable, happen everyday, and should help you move closer towards a goal. (In this case the goal is eating mindfully every meal)

If you have trouble developing your own mindful eating routines there are some out there that Mindful Eating Specialists have that you could use.

One of these mindful eating routines is called BASICS.

BASICS is an acronym that stands for:

• B - Breath and Belly check
• A - Assess your food
• S - Slow down
• I - Investigate your hunger throughout the meal, particularly halfway through
• C - Chew Your food thoroughly
• S - Savor Your Food

Basics is something that is easy to remember and does not take a lot of effort to perform. It can also be performed no matter what type of meal that you are eating.

Your mindful eating routine does not need to be as long as this list. It can be as simple as taking deep breaths before every meal and drinking water in between every bite.