Mindful Eating is a full conscious awareness and observation on what your body feels before eating, while eating, and after you finish eating. Mindful Eating comes from using mindfulness, which means "state of being conscious or aware of something."
In today's world where there is an unlimited amount of processed foods and distraction it is easy to be desensitized to both the taste of food and your hunger/fullness levels. Mindful Eating is all about restoring the brain body connection in a highly stimulated world. Mindful Eating has benefits such as weight loss, reduced stress, reduced food cravings, and more enjoyment of food.
If you want to start applying mindful eating in your daily life it is important to start practicing mindful eating routines. Mindful Eating Routines remind you to Some examples of mindful eating routines: taking deep breaths for a minute before you eat, counting your chews or chewing more than 25 times each bite, and stopping halfway in a meal and seeing how your hunger changed from when you first started eating.
This Beginner's Guide to Mindful Eating will explain to you in detail exactly what mindful eating is, why you need to eat mindfully in the over stimulating world that we live in today, and how to start eating mindfully today and for the rest of your life.
Mindful Eating is a process where you practice conscious awareness and observation on what your body feels before eating, while you eat, and after you finish eating.
Mindful Eating comes from the term mindfulness, which means "state of being conscious or aware of something"
Studies have shown that mindfulness has benefits such as relieving stress, treating heart disease, lowering blood pressure, improving sleep, and improving mental health.
Mindful Eating can be thought of as the mindfulness applied to what you eat.
But there is more to mindful eating than just what you eat. It is also about why you eat and how you feel after eating.
You must be mindful every time you have thoughts about food or you might find yourself doing something that you have no intention of doing.
Just taking the time to pause before you eat and think about everything you have eaten for the day is an example of eating mindfully.
You may have the feeling that you need to eat but taking that time to think how recently you just ate something may help you to decide not to eat at all. Mindful Eating is that easy.
One of the most powerful things about mindful eating is the ability to eat mindfully anytime and anywhere. You don’t need an app, you don’t need to measure how much you eat, and you don’t need to stress yourself out about which foods you should or shouldn’t eat.
Think of mindful eating as a tool you have in your tool box to help you keep track of what you eat and make healthy decisions.
Once you become aware of your thoughts with mindful eating you can improve your diet and overall health.
"You don’t need an app, you don’t need to measure how much you eat, and you don’t need to stress yourself out about which foods you should or shouldn’t eat. "
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4SB8dJmOJk
When we do not eat mindfully we are eating mindlessly. This was not a big problem in the past since people mainly eat as a family without any distractions.
In today’s world people are eating more while they are doing other tasks.
We eat at the movies, we eat when we watch TV, we eat in front of our work, we eat while we are on our phones. This is all mindless eating!
When you mindlessly eat, eating more or less starts to become a habit. Especially when you eat mindlessly with addicting processed foods that never make you full.
In a review of 24 studies on distracted eating, a form of mindless eating, this research paper concluded that reducing attention while eating makes you eat more, reminding someone of the food that they have eaten reduces how much they eat later, and reducing awareness of food previously eaten was shown to make you eat more and this effect was largest
The cure for mindless eating is mindful eating.
Mindfulness and mindful eating will bring power back to an overstimulated brain and body.
We are more distracted than ever and that includes the times when we are supposed to be eating. Distracted eating has been correlated with overeating for years.
Mindless Eating is making decisions about what to eat and when to eat not based on internal cues from the body but based on external or environmental cues.
When we eat mindlessly we are more likely to overeat, eat when we are not hungry, and even forget the times when we eat. We also forget to take the time to fully savor and enjoy our food.
Other negative side effects of mindless eating are overeating are weight gain, less enjoyment of food, more binge eating, eating when you are not hungry, and more important of all losing your feeling of hunger and fullness within your own body.
Mindful eating has health benefits such as:
Just taking the time to pause and consider everything that you’ve had to eat today is a mindful eating practice.
Mindful Eating does not need to become a thing in your life. All you have to do is start becoming aware of your behavior around food.
The studies have shown that once you increase attention to the food that you are eating you can decrease the amount of food that you eat.
One of the biggest benefits of Mindful Eating is the ability to tell when you are hungry or full.
One of the most common examples of not being able to tell is that sometimes we feel hungry but we actually might actually be thirsty. So you eat something but once you are finished you still aren’t full.
The body sends the same signal for hunger and thirst but this would only be something that you could know if you practiced.
Mindful Eating teaches us to be aware of those small details that make a huge impact on our health overall.
Another benefit is getting more enjoyment out of the food that we already eat. If you are eating mindlessly you probably are not taking the time to fully savor what you are eating. If you do not bring your full attention to the meal then you won’t find that benefit.
A mindful routine will bring that focus to your food, making it taste completely from what you believe it tasted like.
You should try mindful eating if:
Cannot sustain weight loss long term: If you have been on a diet for years but you find yourself gaining the weight back it might be beneficial for you to start mindful eating. Mindful Eating helps you build habits that you can sustain for a long time without need for a calorie counter or some type of timer that tells you when to eat. When you focus on the process you tend to get the results that you want and that is what mindful eating does for you. Learning mindful eating will put a focus on the habits that you have around food that will give you the results that you want.
Have a Tendency To Binge or Overeat: When you binge or over eat it is most likely because you don’t feel satisfied with the food that you eat until you eat way too much and possibly have gotten sick. This snowballs into extremely negative emotions that cause you binge more to deal with the emotions and stress of binge eating. Mindful Eating teaches you to be in tune with your body and recognize where you are getting to the point of over eating. With mindful eating you can learn steps to take full control over how your body reacts to food.
Want To Enjoy Food Again: When we eat mindlessly we do not take the time to fully savor and taste what we are eating. Mindful Eating helps you to bring that enjoyment with food. Savoring food not only makes the eating experience more enjoyable but also more memorable too. When you slow down and take the time to notice your emotions they become strong. That’s what Mindful Eating will do for you.
Have Tried Multiple Diets Without Success: In today’s world there are hundreds of diets out there and each one is trying to claim to be the best one. Some try to be the healthiest, some claim to be the fastest weight loss and some claim to be the most sustainable. The truth is that all of these diets work as long as you eat less than you did previously. Being on a diet does not give you a free pass to eat as much as you want. Mindful Eating will help you reduce cravings, build sustainable habits that you can use anywhere, and eat less overall without all of the restrictive rules of a diet.
If you want to start learning to practice mindful eating, start practicing on only one meal a day. As you get more experienced you should aim to do it everyday.
Here is a single mindful exercise that you can do to experience mindful eating.
The more that you practice the easier mindful eating will become for you. I will go over a few mindful exercises that you can practice below if you want to start mindful eating. Eventually you should take the time to take what you learn from these mindful exercises to create your own mindful eating routine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIhZhlcNh28
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 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_IrfyjP88w
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:
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
Mindful Eating Plate: This mindful eating exercise somes 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:
There is also another section for a drink if you have one:
I encourage you to try at least one of these exercises to demonstrate how your outlook on eating changes then you practice mindful eating.
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:
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.
It is up to you to take what you learn and create a mindful eating routine that fits into your lifestyle.