How To Practice Mindful Eating

Whether you want to lose weight, gain weight, or simply improve your eating habits, mindful eating is a tool that can help you foster a better relationship with food and yourself. Here are some tips on how to practice mindful eating.

What is Mindful Eating?

Mindful eating is an approach to eating that focuses an individual’s attention and sensual awareness on their food and eating experience (1). Mindful eating stems from the from the border Buddhist practice of mindfulness; a technique that involves being aware of the present moment without judgment.

Unlike dieting, mindful eating has little to do with weight loss, nutrition, calories, carbohydrates, protein, or fat. The purpose of mindful eating is to foster a healthy relationship with food by encouraging individuals to be fully present in their eating experience and savor their food.

Mindful Eating vs. Mindless Eating

While it might seem obvious, mindful eating is the difference between mindless eating and conscious eating. Mindless eating often occurs when we are distracted, multitasking, or eating too quickly.

When we eat mindlessly, we ignore the who, what, where, when, why, and how of our eating experience (2). This often leads us to eat with little regard for our hunger cues, eat alone or in random places, eat to soothe our emotions, and eat while we are busy doing other tasks. Research has shown that mindless eating is associated with associated with anxiety, overeating, and weight gain (3).

Similar to intuitive eating, the practice of mindful eating helps to make eating an intentional act instead of an automatic one. While the terms intuitive eating and mindful eating are often used interchangeably, they are slightly different frameworks. Although they both help to foster a healthy relationship with food, mindful eating focuses on bringing awareness to our eating experience, while intuitive eating focuses on eating based on internal cues, satisfaction, and the health of the mind and body beyond mealtime. Mindful eating practices can help to promote and support more intuitive eating.

The 3 Principles of Mindful Eating

The fundamental principles of mindless eating are (2):

1. Be aware.

Eating mindfully involves bringing full awareness to every bite of food. This requires you to pay attention to your experiences, behaviors, and emotions while you are eating. You can bring more awareness to your eating experience by focusing on the what, when, and why. This involves being aware of the nurturing nature of food, your sensory experience, and your physical hunger and satiety cues to guide decisions on when to start and stop eating.

2. Be present.

As you eat, work to be in the present moment by paying attention to the where, who, and how of your eating experiences. To be fully present while eating it’s important to plate your food, sit down at a table, eat and chew slowly, and remove all digital distractions, such as phones, TVs, or computers. You can also be more present by focusing on engaging with the people and space around you.

3. Be non-judgmental.

One of the most important aspects of practicing mindful eating is to develop a non-judgmental mindset toward foods and eating habits. An example of this is to avoid labeling foods as “good” or “bad” and specific meals as “cheat meals”. This requires you to acknowledge your responses to food and focus on the process of eating instead of judging yourself as you eat.

Benefits of Mindful Eating

While there is still much more research to be done on mindful eating, as there is no current standard for what defines mindful eating behavior, some of the proposed benefits include (4, 5, 6, 7, 8):

• Promotes a better relationship with food
• Increases satisfaction with food
• Reduces stress around food choices and dietary habits
• Increased awareness of hunger and fullness
• Decreases in emotional eating behaviors
• May aid in weight loss programs

How to Practice Mindful Eating

Here are some tips and ways to practice mindful eating.

1. Honor the food.

Before you start to eat, take a moment to honor the food by acknowledging where the food came from and who prepared the meal.

2. Engage all of your senses.

Notice every sensory experience you experience while eating. Consider the smells, colors, sounds, tastes, temperatures, and textures of your food and your surroundings as you eat.

3. Plate your food.

Instead of eating out of the package, bag, or takeaway container, serve your food on a plate or bowl. This can also help to bring more awareness to the serving sizes and portion sizes of food and help to practice portion control in the process.

4. Eat sitting down.

Instead of eating in the car or while walking around the kitchen, plate your food and sit down at a table to enjoy your meal or snack. While there are certainly times you may need to eat on the go, the more you can eat your meal sitting down the more you can practice mindful eating.

5. Chew and eat slowly.

Savor your food by slowing down and chewing thoroughly. Not only does chewing enhance the mechanical digestion of your food, but it increases your experience of the food and slows down the next bite. Put your fork or spoon down between bites and savor the flavors and textures before you move on to the next.

6. Eat without distractions.

Do your best to eliminate digital distractions while eating, this includes TVs, phones, computers, and any other screens. Research has shown that people are more prone to overeating in the absence of hunger while distracted in front of screens and that prolonged leisure screen time may lead to overconsumption of unhealthy foods, particularly in children and adolescents (9, 10).

7. Socialize over food.

Whenever possible, use your meals as an opportunity to share and connect with others. While food is fuel and nourishment for our bodies, it also nourishes us mentally and emotionally through culture and community.

8. Respect your hunger cues.

Before, during, and after you eat, pay attention to your body and how you feel. Is your tummy growling? Do you feel satisfied and comfortable? Or do you feel stuffed or a little too full? The hunger-fullness scale is an intuitive eating tool that can help you get more in tune with your natural cues and help to distinguish between physical and emotional hunger.

A Mindful Eating Exercise

Here is an example of questions you can ask yourself to practice mindful eating. The next time you eat a handful of almonds, ask yourself these simple questions:

• Look at the almonds; what do they look like?
• Roll the almonds around in your hand; how do they feel?
• Sniff the almonds; what do they smell like?
• Have you put the almonds in a bowl?
• Are you sitting down?
• How slowly can you eat the almonds?
• Have the almonds satisfied your hunger?

The food you eat has a story and the more pieces of the story you know the more it will help you eat mindfully.

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