Optimizing Your Health: 6 Ways to Practice Mindful Eating Habits
You’d be surprised how many people don’t pay attention to how they eat.
It should be intuitive, right? You eat food, digest it, and use those nutrients to fuel your body. Yet, it’s tricky for many of us to actually pay attention to how we consume food on a day-to-day, even a meal-to-meal basis. In fact, it’s almost as if we are on auto-pilot, with nobody actually doing anything behind the wheel.
There’s a lot of problems with this kind of habit, the most obvious being, we wind up eating too much. Or we eat the wrong foods that don’t promote nutrition. Oftentimes this is more of a result of being in a hurry, trying to get through the meal, versus experiencing it.
What can we do to help? A good place to start is by being more mindful—or aware—when eating.
Here are six ways that you can practice mindful eating in your everyday life.
1. Slow Down
When it comes to mindful eating, a good place to start is to slow down when consuming food. This literally means chew your food — slowly.
Remember when you were told to chew your food a certain number of times? It turns out that advice was more important than you realized. Harvard Medical School even recommends we chew each bite about 30 times (that seems like a lot, maybe shoot for 20 at first).
One advantage of chewing your food slowly is that it allows more time to break up your bite into smaller pieces. This makes it easier for your body to digest and absorb nutrients. Another advantage is that your body is able to recognize when it is full and when we can stop eating.
Our body is great at recognizing when we are full and have had enough to eat, but we need to slow down and give it a chance to evaluate.
Chewing our food slowly and intentionally can help our body absorb the things it needs and help our bodies recognize when we are actually full.
2. Tap Into Your Five Senses
When you are eating, don’t just use your taste buds to experience your meal. Rather, tap into your five senses to fully engage with what you are eating. Slow down, appreciate, and further enjoy the food you are eating.
For example:
Start by taking in the visual presentation of your meal. Note the colors, shapes, and arrangement of your food.
Take a moment to breathe deeply and smell the different aromas of your food.
Hold that baby carrot or green bean in your hand. Feel the texture as you chew.
Listen to the crunch your food makes as you eat.
Taste your food and savor the flavors!
Overall, one of the best things you can do is think of eating less as a task in which you must consume calories and more of an experience to be enjoyed and treasured.
3. Watch Out for Emotional Eating
Emotional eating occurs when we respond to certain feelings by eating. For instance, let’s say you feel sad. It can be easy to grab that bag of chips or carton of ice cream, but sometimes we eat in the hopes that we will feel better. This can help you feel better in the short term, but the long term effects of this often make us feel worse.
Eating feels good, is pleasurable, and can release a number of hormones, including dopamine. It can also be a distraction. In fact, some people eat just because they are bored and have nothing else to do.
Try this to avoid emotional eating:
Eat meals at planned times
Put the chips in a bowl and don’t snack from the bag
Get two scoops of ice cream and put the rest in the freezer
There are a lot of small changes you can make that might help. Remember though, ice cream is delicious and highly recommended, IN MODERATION!
4. Keep Your Dinner Table Screen-Free
Screens are everywhere, including the dinner table. At a restaurant, you are more likely to see someone on their phone scrolling through a social media app than eating! An image of the food may even be shared, only then to be devoured in less than five minutes.
The problem with technology at the table is that it is another distraction from your meal. You are less aware (mindful) of what you are eating or how much you have consumed. It’s very difficult to chew for thirty times or think about the flavors from the last bite when we are consumed in something else.
Try putting your phone down, or leaving it in a different room. Even better, engage in conversation with everyone else at the table.
Let your meals serve as an opportunity to bring the people you are sharing that meal with closer together.
5. Pay Attention to Your Body After Eating
One aspect of mindful eating that people don’t always grasp is what happens after you eat. You probably have had it happen before that you ate something, and then afterward realized it wasn’t sitting well with you.
Yet, there are other times when you eat but completely ignore what your body is telling you because the food is not causing you any problems. Or maybe you confuse what it’s saying with something else. For example, do you eat to feel content or do you always eat so much that you feel you are going to burst? Many eat believing the latter is the norm when it should be the former.
Try recognizing some of the positive feelings you get from your favorite meal. You may feel more energetic or optimistic, thinking of the future in a more optimal light. Food can remind us of positive memories of loved ones or past experiences we may have forgotten.
Take some time and think about some of the positive feelings you experience during and after your next meal.
6. Avoid Having Seconds
Who hasn’t so enjoyed what they were eating that they decided to have seconds? But do you really need a second serving of everything? If you feel like you need more to eat, give yourself some time. Take fifteen or twenty minutes before going back for seconds, give your body some time to figure out whether or not it needs more food.
When we get that second helping and we don’t really need it, we’re adding more calories to the meal and we probably don’t even need them. Instead, just limit yourself to one serving and, if you think you need more, give yourself some time to decide.
This can help keep you from overeating and help you appreciate the delicious food you are consuming.
Here is an interesting Ted Talk on Mindful Eating by Natasha Lantz
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Adopting mindful eating will allow you to truly experience your food and be more present with your meal. It can also help with weight loss or just simply eating healthier. For more information on this check out the book “Mindless Eating” by Brian Wansink, PhD.
Emotional eating and other eating problems can sometimes be related to mental health issues like depression and anxiety. If you are discovering that you have an unhealthy relationship with food, feel free to contact me for more information.