Mindful eating is a kind of mindfulness meditation practice that primarily focuses on increasing your awareness while eating your meals.
Mindful eating practices can enhance symptoms associated with depression, anxiety, stress, and eating disorders. In addition, the practice of mindful eating helps promote healthy eating and mitigates overeating while enhancing mental health. Minimizing distractions and slowing down while eating your meals are a few simple ways to improve your awareness while eating. Keep reading to find out more about the benefits of mindful eating and how you can practice it.
Benefits: Promotes weight loss
Mindful eating prevents eating when full by intentionally altering your food choices and mitigating the chances of mindless eating. Since mindful eating eliminates the chances of overeating, this may yield weight loss, assisting the proper regulation of body weight.
Benefits: Reduces stress
Cortisol is often referred to as the stress hormone, and it is involved in the “flight-or-fight” response of the body. When feelings of stress are high, cortisol levels get high too. As per research, mindfulness-based exercises, like mindful eating, can help mitigate cortisol levels.
Benefits: Improves digestion
Digestive conditions like irritable bowel syndrome are impacted by stress levels. As suggested by research studies, mindful eating promotes improved digestion by lowering levels of stress, mitigating overeating, and slowing down the process of eating.
Tips to practice: Use small serving utensils and plates
Use smaller serving utensils to encourage the consumption of less food. Eat on smaller plates as it will enable you to control portion size more easily. Remember, the less you see, the less you eat.
Tips to practice: Slow down and focus on your meal
During every meal, chew your food slowly and try to savour every bite. Try putting your spoon down between bites to slow down your eating. Drink water between bites to allow your body enough time to signal to the brain that it is satisfied and not stuffed. Avoid multitasking. Remove all the devices from the dinner table. By dining at the dinner table, and not on your couch and in front of the computer or TV, you can track how much food you have consumed.
Tips to practice: Keep all distractions at bay
When you begin the practice of mindful eating, try eating alone. Eating in silence can completely free you of all distractions to make the practice easier. Do not worry if you can’t be all by yourself while eating to avoid distractions or to enjoy complete silence. Just do whatever you can to be more mindful while eating.
By employing techniques of mindful eating, you can change your current eating habits and tune to the fullness cues of your body.
