Being mindful when you eat is similar to being engrossed in a good romance novel.
You’d want to take every piece of word bit by bit so you can feel everything, as though you were living the experience.
Mindful eating is simply the act of paying attention, being aware, and staying present while you eat. It simply means not letting yourself get distracted by the new Keke Palmer comedy movie, the John Grisham novel, or The 48 Laws of Power.
Mindful eating means savoring the taste, flavor, the texture of what you eat. It doesn’t bear much on the ‘what’ but on the ‘how’.
How do you eat your favorite meal or snack? Do you munch or do you chew with deliberate intentions of enjoying the food? Do you eat to be satisfied or do you eat to kill boredom?
That’s what mindful eating is about, so instead of dieting, why not eat mindfully?
In this article, we’ll be discovering:
– Why you should practice mindful eating
– Ways You Can Practice Mindful Eating
so you can start eating mindfully.
Why You Should Practice Mindful Eating
Well, aside from the fact that you’ll learn to distinguish the taste of various seasonings and flavors in your food without ever going to a culinary school, mindful eating also helps with:
1. Being Aware of Hunger and Fullness Cues
Yeah, eating is not a sport and shouldn’t be something you do “for the fun of it” or because “you’re supposed to”.
Food was created to achieve satisfaction. When you’re not hungry, you’re satisfied.
But the sad question is; do you know when you’re hungry or when you’re satisfied?
You see, most times, we just eat until our bellies are bloated, and then we think that’s when we’ve become satisfied when in truth, we were satisfied minutes ago without knowing it.
The same thing applies to being hungry. We think we’re hungry because it’s 8 pm and we haven’t had dinner yet.
But, when you eat mindfully because you’re not just munching, you’ll be able to tell when you’re satisfied without first bloating.
And because you’re mindful, you’d also know when you use up that satisfaction; if the growl your stomach makes is because of hunger or digestion.
2. Weight Management
Instead of eating on a calorie deficit because you want to lose weight, just practice mindful eating.
Sincerely, it’s easier and simpler without the math puzzles.
Mindful eating enables you to eat just as much as your body needs, nothing more, nothing less. When you eat mindfully, you take your time to chew before swallowing; this not only helps to speed up your digestion process, but it aligns with your biological clock that registers satisfaction 20 minutes after you start eating.
So, at the end of the day –or meal- your body has gotten all the calories it needs to operate without you stressing about how many calories a cookie has.
3. Minimizing Bloating
I say “minimizing” because I realize that there are some foods that naturally cause bloating whether eaten in a large portion or not, like my all-time favorite –beans.
Now, I always get bloated when I eat beans, but I’ve noticed that since I started eating mindfully, I don’t feel as bloated as I used to.
And yes, I credit it to mindful eating because I chew more now, hence reducing the surface area of my food, so reaction –digestion in this case- takes place faster. Basic chemistry.
4. Changing Eating Behaviour
If there’s only one takeaway from mindful eating, it’ll be the effect it’ll have on your eating habits and your general approach toward food.
Your body will gradually align with your mind over time to tell when you’re hungry and when you’re satisfied, so you don’t find yourself in a room filled with candy wrappers and a finished bucket of popcorn when next you binge-watch season 1 of Bridgerton.
Ways You Can Practice Mindful Eating
Mindful eating has become the easiest thing to exist since the invention of the ABCD song, and I’m not even hyping.
Sure, it’ll take some time to get used to –just as you didn’t learn the song on one try- but once you keep trying, you won’t even know when you stop eating while watching a movie or reading a book or any other distraction that keep you from enjoying the full extent of your meals.
So here are some tricks and tips to help you get used to eating mindfully:
- Serve small portions of your meal
- Do not fill up your eating spoon, eat in bits
- Remove yourself from every distraction; turn off your TV, set your phone down, and close your book or magazine.
- Only eat when it’s most convenient for you, to avoid eating in haste
- Set your timer for 20 minutes
- Chew slowly, and intentionally. Chew, don’t munch
There’s a tendency you’ll finish your food before 20 minutes is over on your first try, but over time, that tendency will change, and you might find yourself not finishing your meal after 20 minutes, and you’d still be satisfied.
This is just the effect of mindful eating, and it’s completely normal.
Takeaway
Mindful eating may seem unrealistic at first because of how busy everyone has become these days and the fast-paced world we now live in.
It’s easier to ask, “Why spend all that time eating when I could have gotten so much done?”
And that there is the problem. We need to care for our health as much as we need to care for our productivity, and one way to do that is by adopting healthy eating habits such as mindful eating.
Plus, if you can spare the time to eat at all, why not do it mindfully? Anything worth doing is worth doing well, after all.
You May Also Like:
Mindless Eating: How It Affects Weight Loss And How To Stop It
What Is Considered A Healthy Meal vs What A Healthy Meal Is
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