Snack Chat: Mindful eating while working from home

Practice these strategies to become a more mindful eater.

Ben R.

Published in

Ascender

5 min readJun 4, 2020

As an entrepreneur, you have a lot on your plate, but are you taking time to think about what’s actually on your plate?

For our May Snack Chat, a free event for our coworking community to connect and learn, we were joined by Ascender member Jenny Nguyen to discuss mindful eating habits. Jenny, a Registered Dietitian and Founder of Imagine Nutrition, has been guiding clients to healthier lifestyles through inpatient and outpatient nutrition counseling since 2009. Through her small business, Jenny helps people imagine what their lives could look like and how to make those goals come true.

Jenny Nguyen, MS, RDN, LDN, is a Registered Dietitian and Founder of Pitsburgh-based Imagine Nutrtion.

Jenny served up helpful strategies to apply mindfulness to your daily eating routine and improve your overall health.

What’s mindful eating?

First and foremost, mindful eating is not a diet. Instead, it is an approach to eating that can help people accomplish a variety of different goals — eating healthier, weight loss, maintaining a weight, eliminating certain foods from your diet, and much more. Mindful eating uses the meditative practice of mindfulness to make people more aware of their physical sensations, feelings, and thoughts. Through mindful eating, you stay present and pay more attention to how you actually feel, what you actually are hungry for, and what you actually need.

Mindfulness as a solution

Anyone and everyone can apply mindfulness to their eating habits, but it is especially powerful for people who are seeking a system that is not based on restrictions. It does not require calorie counting, logging every item eaten, or following fad diets. Moreover, you can practice mindful eating wherever you are! Whether eating at home, at a restaurant, during the holidays, or on vacation, you can incorporate mindful eating habits into your everyday routine.

“With mindfulness, you can minimize the feeling of dieting.” — Jenny Nguyen

Mindful eating doesn’t rely on short-term fixes, but focuses on moderation and creating a ‘new normal’ or baseline for your health and weight. As a result, large weight fluctuations tend to be less likely for those practicing it.

Mindfulness can help if

You’re trying to avoid eating at times when your body isn’t giving you signals that you’re hungry or actually need calories.
You’re trying to stop eating until the point where you’re uncomfortably full.
You want to end the habit of eating while distracted or eating as a distraction.

Eating only when you’re hungry

You should not wait until you are starving and feel lightheaded, but you can start the practice of asking yourself if you are truly hungry. Mindful eating will help you to be more aware of why you are eating and stop eating only because there was food in front of you, someone else was eating, or you saw an ad on TV. One of the best and simplest ways to eat only when you’re hungry is to ask yourself, “Am I actually hungry right now?” When you ask this question, you’ll see that your body is often in need of something else, like water, sleep, or time away from your desk. Somedays, you may respond no and still eat anyway, and that’s fine. Getting into the habit of asking this question can lead to more mindful eating over time.

Simple steps for mindful eating:

Notice — Take time to be more aware of the physical sensation of hunger. When you are starting, you do not want to make judgments or commit to an immediate and drastic change.
Get Curious — After exploring your behaviors, ask yourself questions about your eating habits: What thoughts are in your head before, during, and after a meal? How do certain habits make you feel? What are the triggers for behaviors you want to end? Do you see any patterns? Don’t get overwhelmed and feel the need to interrogate every decision that you make in a day.
Work with your discoveries: As you become more aware of your actions and feelings, think of strategies to respond to the behaviors you want to maintain or change. For example, you notice that you eat fast food after a stressful meeting that you have every Tuesday night. You don’t want this to continue, so next week you will make a point to eat a meal before going to the meeting.

Jenny uses this scale with clients to help them gauge their actual hunger level. She notes that it is ok to sit with the feeling of hunger until you reach the point where you are between a 5–7.

Jenny recommended the following strategies:

Commit to writing down everything you eat throughout the day. This makes you more aware of your eating and meals and can help you make decisions aligned better with your goals.
Keep a list of tasks or distractions (call your friend, water your plants, catch up on the book you’re reading) posted on places like the fridge or pantry. When you feel the urge to eat, if you’re not really hungry, you can see the list and focus on something else.
Do not eat when you are standing up — sitting down to eat forces you to pay more attention to your hunger level and what you are eating.
When eating at a restaurant, ask for a to-go container and place a portion of your meal in the box before you begin to eat. You can do the same practice at home by portioning out leftovers before you sit down to eat.
Try to eat without distraction. Turn off the TV, step away from your desk or computer, and put down your phone. The fewer distractions, the more attention you can pay to and enjoy your food.