6 Steps To Mindful Eating
Mindful eating not only helps to support our digestion, but also benefits our mental health. This article will explore what this practice is and how you can implement it with some simple steps.
Reading time: 5 minutes
Did you know that mindful eating could help benefit everything from your digestion, to your mental wellbeing, and even your body weight?
This article will explain what mindful eating is and how it can benefit you, and teach you how to easily implement the practice of mindful eating into your daily life.
What Exactly Is Mindfulness?
Technically, mindfulness is a gentle form of meditation, usually with the goal being making you more 'aware' of your surroundings. Much like the '5,4,3,2,1' technique for calming anxiety, it aims to put you in the moment, helping you become more aware of your immediate surroundings, helping you to focus on and make the most of the positives around you.
Why Mindful Eating?
Mindfulness can be practiced more generally and has helped thousands of people to live more intentionally and develop the skills necessary to manage various conditions including chronic pain, depression and sleeping problems. Mindful eating changes one's overall approach to eating and, as a nutritionist, I'm a particular fan of it. This means introducing mindfulness to your food shopping, meal planning, cooking and, of course, eating!
Diets often fail because you can become too focused on the 'rules of eating' and are outcome focused rather than process-oriented - whereas with mindful eating, you focus entirely on the process. You savour the moment, your food, and encourage your full presence in order to enhance the whole eating experience.
The main focus is not to lose weight, although it is highly likely that those who adopt this style of eating will also lose weight, because with a mindful approach, a person's choices often are to eat less, enjoy the flavours, and select foods consistent with desirable health benefits.
Mindful eating isn't just for fun, of course, as research is starting to suggest it could also have an array of lovely health benefits, including improving digestion, mental health and body composition, including weight loss.
Re-establishing pride in our food and really enjoying every mouthful is something that we should work on. Unfortunately, this is something that has been lost, almost beyond recognition, by many. Nowadays, the average percentage of income spent on food in the UK is amongst one of the lowest in Europe. This is a gradual decline that has happened over some years.
Nowadays, eating is also often done as quickly as possible and barely even noticed amongst the barrage of screens and other distractions we have going on. In order to get back to healthy, helpful eating, we need to take some time and effort to focus on and enjoy cooking as well as eating.
How can you implement mindful eating?
1. Chew Well
The first step towards eating mindfully is chewing well. Chewing is automatic and everyone knows how to do it, right? Well, the fact that it's so automatic might just be the problem! Most of us tend to chew far too quickly and not anywhere near as thoroughly as we should. Chewing well means chewing each mouthful for at least 20 chews. Practically, this will help to support your digestion, improve satiety (fullness) and allow for better absorption of nutrients from your food.
From a mindfulness point of view, chewing well gives you more time to enjoy your food by noticing every last flavour and texture rather than bolting it down and barely letting it touch the sides of your mouth – where's the appreciation in that?
Handily, chewing properly also gives us more time to breathe. As mindfulness stems from a form of meditation, it is important to put attention on this. Breathing in between mouthfuls can help you relax further and really get into the 'rest and digest' state that your body needs in order to benefit from the food and digest it thoroughly.
2. Eat Slowly
This step and chewing really go hand-in-hand but, still, my advice is to consciously take more time over your meals. By slowing your meals right down, you can experience lots of benefits that you might not have been used to getting.
There are some key benefits - the enjoyment factor is one (we'll go into this in a little more detail later on) and the other one is forming patterns of hunger and satiety. For many of us, bolting our food down too quickly can leave us feeling fuller than we'd like. For some, this can go on to scupper meals later in the day, meaning we can get into an unhelpful pattern of eating too much or too little, for much of the time.
By eating slowly and purposefully you can learn to become more aware of your body's natural signals that tell you to stop eating before you become overly full. This can have benefits on not only your body composition, but also mental wellness. For example, for those who may struggle with feeling guilty after episodes of overeating. Healthier habits can be encouraged all round with something so simple!
3. Eat Fresh
Whilst mindful eating is in no way a strict diet plan, it can help to get you into healthier routines which will ultimately have their benefits on areas such as body weight. There are no radical changes involved, just simple changes of focus and slowing down and switching your mindset to a more positive one when it comes to food.
As part of mindful eating, considering what you are putting into your body and what effects this may have on your health are all important. This is why eating healthy, fresh foods, and cooking your own food as much as possible are such an important part of it. The self-satisfaction from the cycle of cooking your own food, enjoying eating it, and benefiting health-wise shouldn't be underestimated.
Recently, lockdown has had a bit of a negative impact on food security. For some, it manifested through panic buying. and stocking up on shelf-stable, processed food items. Unfortunately, these are the very types of foods that are more likely to encourage mindless eating, as people don't tend to take so much pride in them and simply eat them to fuel themselves rather than paying attention to their nutritional values.
Whilst the current situation is hard to control, mindful eating, to some degree, can still be implemented for most. Even if you're able to make a delicious meal from scratch just once daily, marvel at the ingredients you've put together into a meal. When you focus and mindfully choose to take your time in eating one thing over another, it could make all the difference.
Emma Thornton
Nutritionist working with A.Vogel
