Mindful Eating Tips
Mindfulness
is the practice of bringing our full attention and awareness to the present experience,
Originally appeared on: https://anticancerlifestyle.org/tips-for-mindful-eating/
Mindfulness is the practice of bringing our full attention and awareness to the present experience, without judgement. Mindful eating helps us experience more satisfaction from our eating experiences, and become aware of our thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations related to eating. Mindful eating is a tool to help us reconnect with our innate wisdom (also known as our intuitive eater) that we are born with, such as the ability to honor hunger and satiety signals.
Mindful eating may help us limit stress eating, realize when we feel full and satisfied, and stop eating when we are no longer hungry. Mindful eating can help us slow down our eating pace, which can help us digest food better. Eating mindfully can help limit reactive eating and empower us to make healthier choices without the side of deprivation (unlike dieting, which often leads to feeling deprived of foods we love). An added benefit of mindful eating is that it can help us increase our awareness of our relationships with people and other beings around us.
Think about the last time you ate in front of your computer, while on your phone, while reading, or while watching TV. How simple was it to eat an entire meal or snack without even realizing it? Were you able to savor it, and truly enjoy it? Mindful eating helps us become more conscious of our eating experience, which can lead to more pleasure when eating.
Eating to Cope with Emotions
Mindful eating can help us become aware of the “why” behind our food choices. Are we eating because we’re bored? Stressed? Lonely? Hungry? Eating mindfully allows us to become aware of our feelings before, during, and after we eat, which can help us determine if we are eating for reasons other than hunger. It’s important to keep in mind that emotional eating is a normal part of the human eating experience. You are not “bad” for eating for emotional reasons; we all do!
The key is finding other ways to cope with emotions if you find food is the main way of coping with certain emotions. As I explain to my clients, having other tools to fill the toolbox with so that we have a variety of coping strategies available to cope with emotions can make food less important. This is where working with a therapist can be extremely beneficial to learn new coping strategies. Also, we must learn to practice self-compassion when we do eat for emotional reasons versus wallowing in feelings of guilt, shame, and failure. This encompasses being kinder towards ourselves, such as talking to ourselves in moments of suffering as we would someone we deeply care about.
If we eat when we are not truly hungry, eating won’t necessarily be effective. It may help comfort us for the short term, distract us from the pain, or even numb us. At the end of the day food won’t solve the problem, though. It may only make us feel worse in the long run if it’s happening frequently, and we’ll ultimately have to deal with the source of the emotion.
Below you will find some tips to practice eating more mindfully.
Tips for Mindful Eating:
Make space in your schedule for mealtime as an activity, when possible, to avoid being distracted while eating and allow adequate time to eat.
Before you start eating take a moment to assess your initial hunger level. Are you ravenous? Pleasantly hungry? Not hungry? Somewhere in the middle? Simply notice what your hunger level is prior to eating.
As you start eating, pick one sensory aspect of the food (such as the taste of the food, touch, texture, visual appearance, aroma, mouthfeel, or sound of the food as you eat) to come back to as the mind starts to wander throughout the eating experience (which it will, because that’s the nature of the human mind!).
Have a check-in moment during the eating experience to assess how the food tastes (does it still taste as good as the first bite? Has the taste changed at all? Is it satisfying?) and assess your hunger, fullness, and satisfaction signals. Are you starting to feel emerging fullness? Are you still hungry? Simply notice, without judgement, as you continue to eat.
Practice slowing down your eating pace during meals. Some find it helpful to eat with their nondominant hand, avoid distractions, and intentionally put their utensils down at points throughout the meal to sip on some water and check-in with hunger and fullness signals.
Mindful Eating Exercise
Try the Anticancer Lifestyle Program guided mindful eating exercise to help you get started!