What is mindful eating?

Mindful eating is mindfulness specifically related to our experience with food and nutrition

Being fully present in the moment when you’re eating, without distractions, may promote positive, healthy eating habits and behaviours.

What Is Mindfulness?

Mindfulness means maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment, through a gentle, nurturing lens.

Mindfulness also involves acceptance, meaning that we pay attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging them—without believing, that there’s a “right” or “wrong” way to think or feel in a given moment. When we practice mindfulness, our thoughts tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment rather than rehashing the past or imagining the future.

Why Practice Mindful Eating?

There are many benefits to practicing mindful eating. For one, it can help you become more aware of your hunger and fullness cues, allowing you to better regulate your food intake and maintain your unique balanced weight.

Mindful eating can also help you enjoy your food more fully and reduce feelings of guilt or shame around eating. Additionally, practicing mindful eating can help you become more aware of your emotional triggers around food and develop healthier coping mechanisms.

So how do we practice mindful eating?

The best advice would be like with everything to start small – low and slow – and build up from there. The whole idea is to minimise distractions (phones, tablets, laptop, TV etc.) and tune into the eating experience

Let’s look at some steps to follow:

Step 1 – Set an intention

With every change we want to make in life it is always good to set an intention. To put it out there as it were. To ask the question – What would it take for me to eat more mindfully? 

It is also important to check in with yourself about your intention for the practice: Is this an experiment based on curiosity and intrigue looking at what you might find? Or are you using this as a way to control your eating and possibly eat less. It’s OK if this is where you are at as long as you are being honest with yourself.

Step 2 – Start small

For example you could choose to start with one of the following – taste, texture, temperature, flavour, look, and mouth feel and so on. So in terms of mindful eating begin by focusing your attention on just one of these aspects of the eating experience

Step 3 – One mindful meal

Set an achievable goal as follows:

• One mindful meal 1 - 3 times per week
• One mindful bite at the start of each meal
• One mindful meal a day

Step 4 - Be realistic

It is unrealistic to expect every meal and snack to be a mindful eating experience as most of us are busy with work, study, family etc.

Maybe it is something that you could do at the weekend or on a Sunday when things at home might be a bit more relaxed.

Step 5

John Kabat Zinn (Founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) at the University of Massachusetts) famously described the ‘raisin meditation’ – a mindful eating exercise using a raisin. If you don’t enjoy raisins or don’t have them on hand, use any food you like for this exercise.

This  meditation  gives you a sense of the elements of mindful eating you may want to place your attention on.

 Holding - First, take a raisin and hold it in the palm of your hand or between your finger and thumb. Focusing on it, imagine that you’ve just dropped in from Mars and have never seen an object like this before in your life.

Seeing -Take time to really see it; gaze at the raisin with care and full attention. Let your eyes explore every part of it, examining the highlights where the light shines, the darker hollows, the folds and ridges, and any asymmetries or unique features.

Touching - Turn the raisin over between your fingers, exploring its texture, maybe with your eyes closed if that enhances your sense of touch.

Smelling - Holding the raisin beneath your nose, with each inhalation drink in any smell, aroma, or fragrance that may arise, noticing as you do this anything interesting that may be happening in your mouth or stomach.

Placing - Now slowly bring the raisin up to your lips, noticing how your hand and arm know exactly how and where to position it. Gently place the object in the mouth, without chewing, noticing how it gets into the mouth in the first place. Spend a few moments exploring the sensations of having it in your mouth, exploring it with your tongue.

Tasting - When you are ready, prepare to chew the raisin, noticing how and where it needs to be for chewing. Then, very consciously, take one or two bites into it and notice what happens in the aftermath, experiencing any waves of taste that emanate from it as you continue chewing. Without swallowing yet, notice the bare sensations of taste and texture in the mouth and how these may change over time, moment by moment, as well as any changes in the object itself.

Swallowing - When you feel ready to swallow the raisin, see if you can first detect the intention to swallow as it comes up, so that even this is experienced consciously before you swallow the raisin. After-effects –

 Finally, spend a few moments registering the aftermath of this eating. Is there an aftertaste? What does the absence of the raisin feel like? Is there an automatic tendency to look for another?

Now take a moment to write down anything that you noticed when you were doing the practice.

The raisin exercise can be repeated with any other food. I first did this exercise with a Cadburys chocolate sweet. The exercise really made me aware of how we eat without ever thinking about the act of eating, also how fast I usually eat. We often eat whilst doing something else like reading the paper, watching TV or talking to someone. There is nothing wrong with this but every so often it is no harm to enjoy a mindful meal and really tune into how and why and what you are eating. We all need to slow down our eating and chew food well to aid our digestion and practising mindful eating will help with this. It is also another useful tool to try for anyone looking to manage weight or trying to management emotional eating patterns.

References

1. Kabat-Zinn, J. (2003). Mindfulness-Based Interventions in Context: Past, Present, and Future. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 10(2), 144-156.
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10. Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness. Delacorte.
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