Mindful eating is all about bringing mindful awareness to what you are eating. When you eat mindfully you must become aware of the thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations your body feels before, during, and after you eat. When you eat mindfully you act as an observer and accept the feelings that you experience nonjudgmentally. Instead of focusing on what you are eating you focus on why you eat, how you feel, and how you react to it.
Mindful eating will help you deal with the problem of mindless eating. When you eat mindlessly you make the decision to eat based on external environmental cues or triggers, not because your body tells you to eat. Some examples of mindless eating are emotional eating, distracted eating, or spontaneous eating. Mindless eating by itself on occasion is not necessarily a bad thing. Only when eating mindlessly becomes so common that it is an everyday habit for you is when it can lead to negative outcomes on your mental and physical health.
The first step to real change is awareness. Most traditional eating programs get you to change how you eat by focusing on external factors, which for some people works just fine. For everyone else, there is mindful eating. Mindful eating is about bringing change from the inside. So many of us feel like we have no control over our lives especially when it involves food. You want to feel good about what you eat but you also have regrets when you eat something that you probably shouldn’t have. Mindful eating is the tool that you use to change that.
Mindfulness is all about bringing your awareness and current experience to the present moment. At any moment in time, your mind can be racing with thoughts that take you away from the present moment that you are experiencing. You can exist in a space physically but be in a completely different place mentally when your thoughts take control. When you are being mindful you are not thinking about the past or the present. You are fully integrated into the present moment. Mindfulness is not about being in the present moment every second of your life. Instead, you focus on bringing your awareness back to the present whenever you notice that your thoughts take control of your experience.
So now you’re ready to try mindful eating. Eating mindfully can be broken into three simple phases. The phases are before, during, and after you eat. In each phase, you focus your awareness of different things to see how your thoughts, feelings, and sensations change based on what you are eating. We’ll walk you through what to focus on in each phase.
Before you start eating you should try to remember what the last thing that you ate was. Think about the time that you ate that food and what the reason that you ate was. Very often we can forget we have eaten during the day, causing us to eat more than we need to. Studies have shown that the more aware you are of the things that you’ve eaten throughout the day, the less food that you eat overall.
You should be conscious of how hungry you are before you eat anything. Your body creates physical signals that tell you when you are hungry. The level of hunger that you have depends on the strength of those signals that you receive from your body. You should be careful to notice the difference between a craving and hunger. A craving is a temporary urge to eat that if you ignore will go away on its own. True hungry is a sensation that will only be satisfied with food.
Find out why you want to eat something is one of the best ways to deal with mindless eating. Often times we eat just because we see food that is available in front of us. Your body is programmed to always be searching your environment for any food. You should make sure that the primary reason that you are eating most of your meals should be hunger.
When you eat quickly you give yourself no time to notice how your body changes when you eat. Studies show that noticing when you are full can take up to 15 minutes after you’ve taken your last bite. It becomes easy to overeat when you eat quickly because you miss the point where you finally become full. Eating slowly also helps you to savor and fully enjoy the food that you are eating.
Pay attention to how your hunger changes in response to the food that you are eating. Depending on the food that you are eating your hunger can change quickly or slowly. Gently observe and notice the sensation that you feel in your body. Acknowledge the moment where you are finally full and use that as a sign to stop eating.
Distractions take you away from the present moment instead of helping you stay mindful. Distractions can be both physical and mental. You want to make sure that while you are eating you can stay focused on your food, your body, and your mind. Eating without distractions does not mean that you can’t eat mindfully around other people. Try to bring others into the experience by talking about what you are eating.
Give yourself a moment when you are done eating to see how full you are. Think about the exact moment that you felt that you were full enough to stop eating. Whether you are too full, not full, or just full enough that’s okay. Learn from your experience and use that knowledge the next time that you eat so you can get to a point where you are as full as you want to be.
Food has the power to change the way that we feel physically, mentally, and emotionally. It can make you feel better and sometimes it can make you feel worse. Try to pay extra attention to the food that makes you feel worse because it can slip by without you noticing. People sometimes find that they don’t even enjoy some foods after they start eating mindfully.