What Is Mindful Eating? A Beginner’s Guide to Better Health

What is Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating is a part of a larger philosophy that stems from Buddhism known as ‘Mindfulness’. Mindfulness is a practice that focuses on being in the moment and being aware of what is happening around you and within you in the present. It involves paying close attention to your physical being, your thoughts, and your emotions. Similarly, mindful eating also suggests paying close attention to what you eat or drink, how you chew and noticing things like the texture and the smell of the food and savouring each and every bite. In this guide, you will discover the benefits of mindful eating and how it should be a part of your daily routine.

Why Should You Try Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating has multiple benefits. It supports your physical and mental wellbeing and makes you aware of your health and food choices in the longer run. It helps you distinguish between natural hunger and impulsive bingeing. Being a fragment of mindfulness, it also helps curb anxiety and distraction.

Mindful Eating and Its Role in Health

When you start paying attention to what you eat, why you eat, how much you eat and how you eat it, you start noticing the little things.

• We all know what we eat plays a big role in how our health shapes up. Preparing a balanced meal with available antioxidants in the Indian kitchen naturally, helps address many health related issues.
• Understanding why you eat allows you to identify emotional and habitual triggers. This eliminates the chances of overeating and binging out of boredom or stress.
• Knowing how much you eat makes sure you, get proper nutrition and you stop when your body needs to stop.
• Paying attention to how you chew, how fast you eat is the most crucial part of the process. Chewing your food properly helps aid digestion and avoid related issues. The speed at which you eat affects you physically and mentally. When you savour every bite, you pay attention to the smell and texture of the food, it keeps anxiety and gut health issues at bay.

Mindful Eating and Weight Loss

Mindful eating is directly related to weight loss. A balanced diet with portioned meals is the best and the most effective way to lose weight. While what you eat, why you eat and how much you eat are important parts of the process, how you eat is often overlooked. It takes time for our brain to register that the stomach is full. Therefore, when we eat too quickly, by the time our brain gets the signal to stop, we have already had more than the required portions. Taking around 20 minutes to eat a meal mindfully is a good way to manage actual hunger and to understand the ideal quantity as well. Slowing down and eating mindfully gives our body time to detect fullness and stop.

Mindful Eating and Binge Eating

Binge eating is something we have all dealt with at some point in our lives. Different emotions trigger different types of hunger. If you struggle with binge eating or emotional eating, mindful eating helps you identify the emotional triggers that lead to eating without real hunger. Once you start noticing these triggers, your brain helps you distinguish whether you are truly hungry or if it is just an emotional response. It takes some practice, but once you start doing it, it becomes easier.

Mindful Eating and Emotional Eating

Most people when bored, stressed out, or feeling depressed, turn to food in order to fill the emotional gap. While doing so, they don’t even realize what they are doing to their mind and body until it’s too late. Mindful eating helps you figure out these emotional triggers and respond to them in a better and informed way.

How to Practice Mindful Eating (Step-by-Step)

The Why: Start with understanding the “why”. Why is the first question that should come to mind before choosing your food? Identify why you feel hungry, is it because of the emotional triggers we discussed earlier? Or simply because it’s time for a meal or snack and enough time has passed since your previous meal.

The What: When considering the ‘what’, think about the wider spectrum, where the food came from, who prepared it, how it was prepared. Consider the ingredients and what you should be having vs what you are about to consume. And lastly, see the portion size that is appropriate for your body type.

How Much: Consider how much food is required to satisfy your physical and emotional needs and portion it accordingly. By learning to respond thoughtfully to your emotional triggers instead of reacting impulsively, food can provide your emotional self with the healing it requires without leading to mindless eating.

How to: When you see food in front of you, start by taking, a couple of deep breaths to calm yourself in whatever state you might be. While eating, notice the smell and texture of the food. If your mind wanders, try to bring it back by noticing the ingredients your food is made of. Savour every bite. Chew properly and don’t rush. You might notice that your mind wanders off a lot, and that’s ok, every time that happens, just bring yourself back to the food and express gratitude for the meal.

Mindful Eating vs. Mindless Eating

Mindful eating is about being fully present and experiencing your meal, whereas mindless eating is its opposite, often resulting from distractions or disorders like stress, anxiety and depression. You might notice yourself rushing through a meal when you have a task on your mind or if you are multi-tasking while eating. Many times, we even struggle to recall what we ate for our last meal, which indicates that we were not fully present.

Tips to Build a Mindful Eating Environment

• Create a dedicated space for meals
• Set up a relaxed atmosphere and try to get rid of all the screens around you
• Use smaller plates if you are practicing portion control
• Start planning your meals weekly
• Try to follow a particular timetable for meals

निष्कर्ष

Mindful eating is a way of life that can be practiced in most circumstances. Even if your hectic schedule doesn’t allow you the time to fully practice mindful eating, you can still simply start by slowing down during the meals and focusing solely on the food. However, making time for your meals, and consistently practicing mindful eating will bring visible improvements in health, stress and anxiety levels, digestion and more.