Mindful Eating, a buzzword for many years, used by dieticians or health influencers. But do you know what it is?
Go ahead! Here is a blog that will talk only about eating mindfully. It is a five-minute read that has the power to change your lifestyle.
What is Mindful Eating?
Before jumping on the term, “Mindful Eating,” let us understand mindfulness. Mindfulness is being in the present moment with your mind, body, and external environment while carrying an attitude of curiosity and kindness.
It is a time when you use your senses to eat satisfying and nourishing food. It is a time when you use all your senses to choose to eat satisfying and nourishing food. Inculcating mindful eating helps us to understand our behaviour and attitude towards different food choices.
One would be amazed to know that many therapeutic paradigms use mindfulness to cure patients with psychological issues. Mindful eating is a secular and religious practise observed in Hinduism and Buddhism. It plays a massive role in psychology and is used as a tool for stress reduction in Western countries.
The blog will help you understand the actual meaning of eating mindfully and make you aware of the various misconceptions.
Read more to find out the unbiased view on mindful eating.
My transformation journey toward mindful eating
I was in my 200-hour yoga teacher training course when I wandered over to the food kept on the dining table. The plates were filled with colourful vegetables and salads that looked very tempting. Our trainer instructs us to take a mouthful of vegetables and salads and then keep our cutlery aside. Then we were asked to chew that food 35–40 times. Initially, chewing a bit 40 times was quite painful for the jaws.
We had daily mindful eating sessions; soon, eating mindfully became the best part of the day. It is not a one-day achievement. It needs a hell of a lot of practise and patience. The whole idea behind mindful eating is to be present in the moment to feel more connected to our bodies and increase our energy levels. Also, mindful eating helps in improving digestion and absorption of nutrients.
With constant practise and attention, eating mindfully has become my lifestyle. It relaxes my mind and fills my stomach at the same time. The yoga teacher training course initiated the transformation, and we accepted the challenge. Joining a yoga retreat has worked perfectly and helped me better understand my body and mind.
Why should you try mindful eating?
Eating these days has become a mindless act. We are so engrossed in televisions and smartphones that we fail to develop a beautiful relationship with food. All these activities have made our brain slow; thus, it takes 20 minutes to understand that our body is full.
Mindful Eating will help you differentiate between emotional and physical hunger. By eating mindfully, you restore your attention and slow it down. As your body realises the difference between the automatic and intentional act of eating, you improve. Practicing mindful eating will make you aware of your food-related triggers and help you choose and respond to them accordingly.
How to practise mindful eating?
Here are a few guidelines that will help you practise eating mindfully:
- Eat slowly, and do not rush your meals.
- Chew thoroughly.
- Eat without any distractions from TV, books, or radio.
- Eat-in silence.
- Once you feel full, just stop eating.
- Focus on how the food makes you feel.
- Eat healthily. Eat when you are hungry, and understand your hunger cues.
You can not change your eating habits all at once, so start with one meal and practise mindful eating by following the below-given directions:
Your Brain (understanding your thoughts)
Your thoughts influence your behaviour, primarily when these thoughts are rooted in your diet. You can reframe your ideas and make them motivating or helpful. Identify those unhelpful thoughts and eradicate them from your brain, at least when eating.
When I started to eat mindfully initially, I used to gaze at the dish and feel every bite. My whole concentration was on the food. I felt thoughtless at the moment, and soon I began to indulge in a food-loving journey.
body (assessing hunger)
The second step is to check more massive levels. It is a point where you try to understand your body’s requirements. Check to see if you are hungry and how hungry or full you are. Noticing the ravenous levels will help you decide what to eat.
The idea is to know what your body needs at every moment of the day. If you feel a little hungry, try eating healthy bars or dry fruits. Also, fruit can satisfy your little hunger.
Senses (tuning)
Now comes the final check of our senses. Here, we tune our senses and alert them to start mindful eating. Eating involves all the senses: touching your food and understanding the texture of different foods; seeing the food and embracing it; smelling the food and charging your mind; tasting the food; satisfying your hunger, and finally hearing the chewing of food.
Eating a bowl of different dry fruits helped me notice and differentiate among the various dry fruits. Every dry fruit was unique in texture, smell, taste, and even sound. Usually, we don’t notice these little things, but to make the most of them, one must practise mindful eating and embrace the beauty of food.
The difference between mindful eating and intuitive eating is that
Often, the term “mindful eating” is confused with “intuitive eating.” These words are related but very different and can not be used interchangeably. Let this blog help you to understand these terms.
Intuitive eating is all about making peace with food. An anti-diet regime goes beyond eating based on guidelines addressing your body movements, nutrition, and body image. There are ten basic principles of intuitive eating based on accepting your body and honouring the feelings of hunger and fullness.
Intuitive eating is all about eating food that tastes good and makes you feel good. Eating mindfully is a step toward intuitive eating. Though intuitive eating often involves mindful eating, not always, intuitive eating sometimes consists of eating food with distractions like watching TV or listening to some music. The goal of intuitive eating is not to think about food all the time you eat. It tells you to enjoy your food and satisfy yourself. Intuitive eating works on ten principles, and to follow these guidelines perfectly, one must practise eating mindfully.
Various research on intuitive eating shows that people following intuitive eating have linked a healthy attitude toward food and self-image. To start with intuitive eating, you must eat without judgement and become more aware of how and what to eat.
The Advantages of Mindful Eating
I am sure this will be the best part of the blog; who would not love to know the excellent benefits derived from mindfulness eating? Here we go:
1. Stress Reduction
When we look for peace in the hustle and bustle of life, mindful eating comes to the rescue. Research says that practising mindfulness activities like eating mindfully helps in reducing the stress hormone named cortisol. Mindful eating, when practised religiously, will help you reduce stress. Eating mindfully is an effective therapy to reduce stress.
2. Better Digestion
While practising eating mindfully, we tend to chew the food so well that it becomes easy for our digestive system to perform digestion in a better way. Also, if you are stressed, you will have poor digestion; thus, practising mindful eating will reduce stress, thus improving your digestion.
3. Weight Loss
Thus, as mindful eating works on the principle of stopping eating when you feel full, it helps prevent overeating. It will help you develop healthy eating choices intentionally and decrease mindless eating. It is also regarded that practising eating mindfully helps in reducing weight without even counting calories.
4. Reduced Overeating
Eating mindfully comes with a pause button. The pause button draws a line between overeating and binge eating. We also know that mindfulness activities consistently reduce anxiety and depression; thus, mindful eating helps the mind judge and make great food choices. Therefore, there is no point in binge or emotional eating while practising mindful eating.
5. Increased Satisfaction
Mindful eating makes you fall in love with the food you eat. While practising eating mindfully, you gaze at the food on the plate, feel your food, and simply start loving it. This whole process helps you develop a connection with food. You will be delighted and thankful for the food every time.
6. Healthy Alternatives
Eating mindfully helps you focus on the food, eventually increasing its nutrients. You will not feel sluggish or heavy after eating mindfully; instead, you will feel more energised and ready to act. Once you know the foods and understand how the foods make you think and feel, you will start making healthy choices.
7. Raised Awareness
Instead of hurrying through the food, mindful eating will ensure that you eat the right amount and proper choice of food. Eating mindfully makes you aware of your hunger and fullness signals. Because our stomach takes time to recognise fullness, we occasionally overeat. While in the case of mindful eating, you will feel full at the right time.
So, this was all about the exceptional benefits derived from eating mindfully. Now let us understand the problems with mindful eating.
Problems in Mindful Eating
The books and guidelines have made mindful eating very popular and inaccessible for many. Reading any eating mindfully blog, article, or book shows us that we need to meditate over each bite, which is tiring and not relaxing. But in real life, having a meal is sometimes like multitasking or eating with distractions.
Even after practising eating mindfully for years, I sometimes watch Netflix while having dinner because it is more pleasurable and comforting. Though it is intuitive eating, I can also taste the food better and feel the satisfaction it is giving me.
Also, eating mindfully guides tell you not to be judgemental with your food. It’s not possible to eat without judgement if you’re going into a meal expecting to eat less or eat the “right” things.
We must know that the meaning of eating mindfully is more profound than how we use it in our driven, multitasking lives. It is about encouraging the experiences we derive from eating. Eating mindfully intends to appreciate the food experience rather than restrict the intake. Mindful eating, if religiously followed, can make a lot of improvement in your overall health.
Tips for Beginners
If you are a beginner at mindful eating, these tips will help you to make eating mindfully easy:
- Pick a meal or a snack for mindful eating. It would be appropriate to choose a dinner meal for practising eating mindfully because, usually, we finish our breakfasts in a rush. So dinner time would be a perfect time to start with mindful eating initially.
- Try to match your pace with a slow eater. Eat as slowly as possible, and you can take down your cutlery while your mouth is filled with bites. Or else you can set a timer of fifteen minutes to understand what it feels like to eat with mindfulness.
- You can also eat alone or without any sort of distraction.
- Control your thoughts while you eat because these thoughts are responsible for influencing your behaviour and wisdom. It is essential to know that eating mindfully goes beyond paying attention to your food.
Takeaways
Mindful eating is an unrealistic thing and a next-to-impossible task for many of us. Even after so many attempts at mindful eating, you will be unable to continue; this is perfectly normal. But avoid eating mindlessly and ignoring your body’s signals.
Before starting a meal, relax your mind, check your food, understand your body’s hunger, take a bite, chew it well, and YEAH, you are good to go. There is no right or wrong way to practise mindful eating, and it is an art that takes time to reach its perfection level. Do not force yourself or hassle yourself in the act of learning mindful eating. Enjoy the moment and be proud that you are working hard each day.
Create a joyful relationship with food through mindful eating!