Wondering how to practice mindful eating? It’s a technique that helps you gain control over your eating habits. It has been shown to promote weight loss, reduce binge eating, and help you feel better.
What is mindful eating?
Mindful eating is based on mindfulness, a Buddhist concept, which is a form of meditation that helps you recognize and cope with your emotions and physical sensations.
Mindful eating is about using mindfulness to reach a state of full attention to your experiences, cravings, and physical cues when eating.
Fundamentally, mindful eating involves:
• eating slowly and without distraction
• listening to physical hunger cues and eating only until you’re full
• distinguishing between true hunger and non-hunger triggers for eating
• engaging your senses by noticing colors, smells, sounds, textures, and flavors
• learning to cope with guilt and anxiety about food
• eating to maintain overall health and well-being
• noticing the effects food has on your feelings and figure
• appreciating your food
These things allow you to replace automatic thoughts and reactions with more conscious, healthier responses.
Why should you try this form of eating?
• Today’s fast-paced society tempts people with an abundance of food choices.
• On top of that, distractions have shifted attention away from the actual act of eating toward televisions, computers, and smartphones.
• Eating has become a mindless act, often done quickly. This can be problematic, since it takes your brain up to 20 minutes to realize you’re full.
• If you eat too fast, the fullness signal may not arrive until you have already eaten too much. This is very common in binge eating.
• By eating mindfully, you restore your attention and slow down, making eating an intentional act instead of an automatic one.
• What’s more, by increasing your recognition of physical hunger and fullness cues, you are able to distinguish between emotional and true, physical hunger (10Trusted Source).
• You also increase your awareness of triggers that make you want to eat, even though you’re not necessarily hungry.
• By knowing your triggers, you can create a space between them and your response, giving you the time and freedom to choose how to react.
Eating More Slowly helps with weight loss
Binge eating, emotional eating, external eating, and eating in response to food cravings have been linked to weight gain and weight regain after successful weight loss. Chronic exposure to stress may also play a large role in overeating and obesity.
The vast majority of studies agree that mindful eating helps you lose weight by changing your eating behaviors and reducing stress.
• A 6-week group seminar on mindful eating among people with obesity resulted in an average weight loss of 9 pounds during the seminar and the 12-week follow-up period.
• Another 6-month seminar resulted in an average weight loss of 26 pounds, without any weight regain in the following 3 months.
By changing the way you think about food, the negative feelings that may be associated with eating are replaced with awareness, improved self-control, and positive emotions.
Mindless eating and unhealthy eating behaviors
In addition to being an effective treatment for binge eating, mindful eating methods have also been shown to reduce:
• Binge Eating involves eating a large amount of food in a short amount of time, mindlessly and without control.
• Emotional eating is the act of eating in response to certain emotions.
• External eating occurs when you eat in response to environmental, food-related cues, such as the sight or smell of food.
Mindful eating gives you the skills you need to deal with these impulses. It puts you in charge of your responses instead of at the whim of your instinct.
How to practice mindful eating
Many people find it helpful to attend a seminar, online course, or workshop on mindfulness or mindful eating. However, there are many simple ways to get started, some of which can have powerful benefits on their own:
• Eat more slowly and don’t rush your meals.
• Chew thoroughly.
• Eliminate distractions by turning off the TV and putting down your phone.
• Eat in silence.
• Focus on how the food makes you feel.
• Chew slowly and make the meal take 20 minutes.
• Stop eating when you’re 80% full.
• After 20 minutes your leptin hormone will kick in and send your belly a signal to stop eating.
• Ask yourself why you’re eating, whether you’re truly hungry, and whether the food you chose is healthy.
Start by picking one meal per day to focus on these points. Once you have the hang of it, mindfulness will become more natural. Then you can focus on implementing these habits into more meals.
Click here to learn more about how to slow down your eating and enjoy food more.
