Today, a majority of people spend significant time in a day eating but many of them may not be able to remember everything they ate after a couple of hours of the meal. It mainly happens because most of the time during eating, they’re doing something else simultaneously – from working, reading, driving watching television or staying engaged with an electronic device. In short, they’re aware of everything except what they’re consuming. If you too belong to this league, it’s time to transform your relationship with food. In this post, I’m going to offer 6 mindful eating techniques, which are “informal” mindful eating – to be specific. Because when you’re having food with family or during a lunch break in the office or in a hurry, it’s not possible to eat as mindfully as you do in a mindful course or on retreat. In addition, it’s quite normal if your family members, friends or colleagues don’t have the patience to match your pace when you practice mindful eating.

Mindful eating – The concept

Mindful eating completely encompasses the Buddhist concept – mindfulness. It’s a form of meditation that aids you calmly acknowledge and accept present thoughts, feelings and bodily sensations. Mindful eating is all about using mindfulness when eating to attain a state of complete attention to your cravings, experiences and physical cues. Put simply, it’s eating with an intention of caring for yourself.

The techniques

Here’re 6 simple yet highly effective techniques to engage your mind more deeply when eating and to harmonize your body and mind.

Pay attention to your body’s hunger signals

Are you eating in response to emotions or in response to your body?
We usually listen to our mind first, but similar to different mindful practices, if we can tune into our body first, we can get benefitted more. There’re lots of people who get caught up in their hectic schedules and simply ignore their body’s cues for fullness and hunger, which lead them to extremes, making unhealthy choices. Instead of letting various emotional signals such as frustration, sadness, loneliness, stress or simply boredom control your food consumption, try to listen to your body’s signal. This could be anything from experiencing lack of energy, stomach growling to a little lightheaded feeling. True mindful eating is all about listening deeply to your body’s cues for hunger. Try to find out the hunger signals of your body as well as your emotional hunger triggers.

Let your body reach out to your brain

Eating quickly past full versus slowing down and stopping in response to your body’s fullness
Mindful eating heavily depends on proper communication between your mind and body, and lowering the pace of eating is perhaps the best way to attain it. Human body sends its signal of satiation approximately 20 minutes after the brain, which is the key reason behind unconscious overeating. But, if you slow down, your body gets the time to synchronize with your brain and hear the cues to eat the exact amount. There’re lots of ways to reduce the pace of eating such as sitting down to eat, setting the fork between bites, chewing every bite 25 times minimum and all those old manners your grandmother told you. These apparently pointless manners can actually help you slow down eating and listen to your body more deeply.

Forget stories, concentrate on foods

Prioritizing nutritionally healthy foods over emotionally comforting foods
Remember what you ate first when you started mindful eating. Did that seem enticing before you actually tried it? Most probably, it didn’t. There’s a plethora of reasons to adopt mindful eating but slowing down and eating nutritionally healthy foods in proper amounts are perhaps the biggest ones. In addition, when you eat something mindfully ignoring the stories about healthy foods, the eating often becomes more enjoyable. What’s more, when you practice healthy eating and let your taste buds experience a diverse range of foods, you become less inclined to binge on emotionally comforting foods and more inclined to consume healthy foods. There’re lots of foods that are physically satisfying, nourishing and comforting at the same time as opposed to limited varieties of foods we often concentrate on, when eating mindlessly.

Build up healthy eating environments

Eating alone and rapidly versus eating in groups at fixed times and places
We often look through cabinets when wandering around and end up in mindless eating at different times and places instead of proactively thinking about the meals and snacks. It may help to ward off hunger but heavily disrupts the development of healthy eating environments. It also makes us ignorant about what and how much to consume while sending new cues to our brains for eating unhealthy foods. Everyone snacks from time to time but it shouldn’t be in a hurried manner. Proper eating environments can promote wellbeing of both your mind and body, and greatly help in developing a mood and sleep pattern to eat at set times and places. Simple methods such as sitting down properly, putting food on a bowl or plate, using utensils instead of hands, avoid eating right from the container etc can do wonders when it comes to mindful eating. You should also try to develop a habit of eating with others to promote sharing and achieving healthy connections. In addition, it helps you lower the pace, avoid overeating triggered by emotions and enjoy the food while having healthy conversations.

Another way to promote mindful eating is keeping your food away in the fridge or cabinets. So, consider the foods around, where they’re kept and if they’re within sight, try to put them away. Focus on eating only in the kitchen or dining room to avoid mindless eating or eat while multitasking.

Holidays can’t be imagined without foods, which mayn’t be the healthiest always. It’s important to note that you don’t need to follow mindful eating techniques 365 days a year. Instead, it’s important to be flexible at special occasions. All you need to do is remember the thing that you might be changing the habit for different occasions or at different times of year. This advance planning will help you identify the right amount of food your body needs and to avoid undereating or overeating, both of which have adverse effects on your body.

It’s advisable not to shop when hungry to avoid the psychological effect called “moral licensing”. It has shown that buyers who purchase kale, often head to ice cream or alcohol section compared to those who don’t. We often think that we can balance out the effects of unhealthy foods through other activities, but in reality that hardly happens.

When you eat, just eat

Eating when distracted versus only eating
Multitasking and eating is a sure shot recipe that heavily obstructs the process of listening to your body’s cues and needs. We all have experienced something like going to a movie with a large bag of popcorn and once the movie is over, we keep on asking who ate the popcorn. This classic example shows nothing but the difficulty we face in listening to our body’s cues about food and related needs when we’re distracted. So, at your next meal, try to single-task and just eat without any distraction apart from enjoying the company of your fellow eaters.

Honor the life cycle of the food

Considering the entire life cycle of food versus considering it as an end product
A majority of us have become gradually disconnected from food. Today, we don’t even think of the huge efforts that are associated with food. For instance, we never consider the originating point of a meal beyond the supermarket packaging. This way, we simply miss out on the huge opportunity to connect to the natural world and its elements. On the other hand, when we take some time out to think of the people involved in the life cycle of the food that we’re going to eat, we become interconnected and grateful to their efforts. So, pause for a moment and think of the people who prepared the food, who maintained the stocks and first of all, who cultivated the raw ingredients and those who supported them. Also, consider the roles of water, soil and associated elements that were inherent parts of the food’s creation as you sit down to eat. This way, the cultural traditions behind the preparation of the food would get reflected in your mind and together with small contributions like recipes shared by friends or tips gathered from a distant place or time, they would all make your meals more delicious.

As you start thinking of everything of a food, from start to end that goes into your meal, you begin to experience and express gratitude effortlessly toward everyone associated with the preparation of the food. From the people who invested their hard work and time, the natural elements that contributed toward it to your ancestors or friends who shared the recipes or contributed significantly. This little mindfulness greatly helps you make wiser choices about health and sustainability offered by food as a whole.

Final Takeaway

You may think of mindful eating practices as only a part of mindful retreat or a course that you’ve attended, but in reality, these can be easily incorporated in your daily life too. All you need to do is to gain valuable insights from the formal practice of mindful eating – from listening to your body, lowering down the pace, contemplating small things, only eating (sans distractions) and at set times and places, along with honoring everyone’s contribution to the food’s life cycle. All of these techniques will help you master informal mindful eating and to reap the advantages at the optimum level.

Steps towards living more healthy can be quite simple.Are you ready to learn how you can live your healthiest?

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