What is Mindful Eating?
What is Mindful Eating? According to Harvard Health, mindful eating is “being fully attentive to your food — as you buy, prepare, serve, and consume it.”
It’s easy to eat on autopilot or while multitasking. We all do it! That includes eating in front of any screen or while continuing to work. Many of us also eat to fill emotional voids, such as when we’re sad, stressed, or even happy and relieved about something. This isn’t always a bad thing to have food fill these voids, but we can still practice mindful eating in these situations.
Mindful eating encompasses SO many subtopics, but a few mindful eating habits to start practicing are as follows:
Eating when hungry, stopping when full
Limiting the distractions around you while eating (phone away, turn off TV, put book down, close your work laptop)
Thinking about the taste, textures, smells, and ingredients of your food as you eat
Chew your food thoroughly
Eating with gratitude for the food in front of you even if it’s not your favorite meal
Benefits of mindful eating:
Enhances enjoyment of meals
Reduces overeating
Aids in digestion of meals
Reduces anxious thoughts around food
Improves your psychological relationship with food
Eating mindfully is no easy task. But it’s such a profound way of eating that uses all of our physical and emotional senses to experience and enjoy the food in front of us, so it’s worth implementing one or two mindful eating tips every week to see how you feel. I bet you’ll be surprised by how much you can notice when you stop eating on autopilot and start truly focusing on the gift that each meal is. Remember not everyone can have 3 meals and snacks each day!
