Mindful Eating 101: Transform Your Relationship with Food
Hey People! Don’t you think paying attention to the moment to moment experience of eating can help you improve your diet, manage food cravings, and even lose weight? Let’s discuss in this article how to start eating mindfully. 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.
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful eating is an approach to food that focuses on individuals’ sensual awareness of the food and their experience of the food. It 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.
Benefits of Eating Mindfully
- It is beneficial to slow down and take a break from the hustle and bustle of your day, easing stress and anxiety.
- It ensures changes in your relationship with food helping you to notice when you turn to food for reasons other than hunger.
- It drives greater pleasure from the food you eat, as you learn to slow down and more fully appreciate your meals and snacks.
- Ensures healthier choices about what you eat by focusing on how each type of food makes you feel after eating it.
- Mindful eating improves your digestion by eating slower. It makes a greater connection to where your food comes from, how it’s produced, and the journey it’s taken to your plate.
How to Practice Mindful Eating
- Start by taking a few deep breaths and considering the health value of each different piece of food. It is crucial to employ all your senses while you’re shopping, cooking, serving, and eating your food.
- Acknowledge your surroundings but learn to tune them out such as focusing on what’s going on around you can distract you from the process of eating and take away from the mindfulness experience.
- Ask yourself questions such as are you eating because you’re actually hungry or is it that you’re bored, need a distraction.
- Appreciate the food you eating, pay attention to the textures, shapes, colors and smells of the food.
- Take time to consider how you feel. Listen to your stomach, not your plate. Know when you’re full and stop eating.
- Be more mindful about the origins of food you purchasing and consuming as it helps us to make wiser and more sustainable choices.
- Try to stay present to the experience of consuming the food.
Mindful eating comprises of components such as paying attention to our food, on purpose, moment by moment, without judgment, it is an approach to food that focuses on individuals’ sensual awareness of the food and their experience of the food. Furthermore, It ensures practices that are beneficial in managing stress, coping better with serious illness and in reducing anxiety and depression.
References:
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/mindful-eating-guide
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-minute-mindfulness-while-eating/
https://connect.mayoclinic.org/blog/take-charge-healthy-aging/newsfeed-post/tips-for-mindful-meals/
https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.org/hometown-health/speaking-of-health/fuel-for-your-mind
