Mindful Eating: What Does It Entail?

Mindful eating is a practice that is inspired by the Zen Buddhism belief of mindfulness. This practice of mindfulness while eating has gained popularity as a technique for self-calming and for improving eating habits and experiences. In addition to being one of the most recommended dietary behavior improvements, mindful eating is now widely integrated into behavior change programs and therapeutic treatments.

What is mindful eating? It is the practice of maintaining a present-moment consciousness of the foods and liquids you consume while eating. It entails paying attention to your feelings toward the meal and to your body’s cues regarding flavor, satisfaction, and fullness. To practice mindful eating, you must learn to accept your feelings, thoughts, and sensations without judging them.

Mindful eating aims to rectify, and maybe even prevent, all the physical, emotional, and psychological problems that can arise from mindless eating and meal preparation. In this article, we will discuss why mindful eating is important, the benefits it offers, and what foods you should eat to improve your mental health.

The Fundamentals: Why Is Mindful Eating Needed?

Most people today only rush through their meals without paying any attention to the experience, taste, and sensations that their meals offer. The core purpose of mindful eating is to help us forgot these unhealthy ways of eating and become more aware of what we eat, why we eat it, and how it makes us feel, physically and mentally.

For the majority of people today, our hectic daily schedules and overloaded work lives do not allow us the time to sit back, take a break, and revel in the experience and taste of our meals. Instead, we hurry through our meals while commuting to work, lounging on the couch watching TV, at a desk in front of a computer screen, or doing something else.

We mindlessly stuff our faces with food, regardless of whether or not we are still hungry, and we keep doing so until we’re full to the neck. In reality, the bitter truth is that for many of us, our consumption of food and beverages is hardly ever driven by hunger anymore. Instead, we eat to satisfy emotional demands, release stress, or bury our difficult-to-face and unpleasant emotions such as depression, anxiety, sadness, loneliness, or even boredom.

These destructive eating habits harm us not only physically but also mentally and emotionally. This is because the temporary comfort and relief we get from these untimely and improper eating methods keep us from confronting our inner demons and receiving the help we need.

Mindful eating offers us the perfect escape from these unhealthy eating habits and helps us achieve a healthier lifestyle.

How to Practice Mindful Eating?

Practicing mindful eating requires you to adopt the habit of eating only when you are hungry and only until you are full. It also involves facing your insecurities associated with food. In addition to this, you must also learn to acknowledge and accept the feelings and sensations you get when eating.

However, before you go and empty out your refrigerator and pantry and throw out all your old food, remember that mindful eating is not some strict flawless eating regime that prohibits you from all the tasty foods and limits you only to the veggies. Neither does it impose stringent limitations on how many calories, carbohydrates, or protein you can consume in one day; it is by no means a weight-loss strategy. And technically speaking, mindful eating doesn’t condemn eating on the go either.

On the contrary, the core concept of mindful eating is to remain completely present and in sync with all your senses when you are eating, shopping, or preparing your food.

While mindful eating is not everyone’s cup of tea, many individuals have found that you can become more conditioned and acclimated to your body by eating in this way, even for only a few meals per week. By doing this, you can prevent yourself from overeating, improve your eating patterns, and benefit from the enhanced health that accompanies this eating style.

A study published by the National Library of Medicine, “Mindfulness-based stress reduction and health benefits. A meta-analysis,” reports that mindfulness while eating can be used to treat problems such as depression, eating disorders, anxiety, and other food-related behaviors.

Following is a simplified breakdown of how you can practice mindful eating:

● Eat slowly and with patience

● Observe how eating affects your mood and appearance

● Avoid distractions when eating and stay focused on your meal

● Identify signals of physical hunger from your body

● Eat only until you are full

● Make use of all your senses when eating by relishing the aromas, colors, sounds, flavors, and

textures of your food when eating

● Learn to differentiate between non-hunger triggers for eating and true hunger

● Eat to maintain and improve your health and well-being

● Confront your food-related insecurities and anxieties

● Appreciate your food

Benefits of Mindful Eating

Increased Awareness of Hunger and Fullness

Eating without distractions when practicing mindful eating allows one to be better informed about the body’s hunger and fullness cues. Eating slowly gives your body time to process and signal when you’ve eaten enough because it can take some time for the stomach to realize that it is full.

This way, you will begin to understand how much food you really want and need to consume instead of overloading yourself with unhealthy amounts of food, as you do when you rush through your meals.

Hunger cues generally appear in the form of fatigue, increased irritability, and a grumbling stomach. On the other hand, less enjoyment from the food, a stomach that feels comfortable and slightly pressured, and loss of hunger are all signs of being full.

Weight Loss

While mindful eating is not a weight loss strategy in and of itself, the practice has proven time after time to help in this regard. This is because one of the primary reasons for obesity in America is that people tend to stuff themselves with food even after they are full.

Mindful eating helps avoid this kind of overeating by inculcating within you the habit of recognizing your fullness cues and stopping eating once you're full. In addition, mindfulness reduces thoughtless eating, allows you to chew and digest food better, and adjust your food preferences.

All in all, this helps lower your calorie and carbohydrate consumption by allowing you to eat less, and this, in turn, can help reduce weight. A study published by the National Library of Medicine, “Eating attentively: a systematic review and meta-analysis of the effect of food intake memory and awareness on eating,” concluded that mindfulness while eating can help reduce weight without the need for conscious calorie counting.

Stress Reduction

When a body is stressed, it releases stress hormones in the system, such as Cortisol. The increase in the concentration of these hormones triggers the person’s fight or flight response and makes them feel uneasy and on edge.

Research published in the journal of Frontiers in Physiology, called “Effects of Mindfulness-Based Interventions on Salivary Cortisol in Healthy Adults: A Meta-Analytical Review,” suggests that mindful eating and other mindfulness-based practices can assist your body lower its Cortisol levels, and in doing so, lower your stress.

Reduced Overeating and Binge Eating

Practicing mindful eating requires one to remain fully aware and present when consuming food and beverages and learn to identify the hunger and fullness cues of the body. As such, this practice provides overeaters and people with eating disorders a framework for pausing their eating and checking in with themselves.

This, in turn, helps people overcome their habit of binge eating and overeating. A research featured by ScienceDirect, “Mindfulness meditation as an intervention for binge eating, emotional eating, and weight loss: A systematic review,” verifies this conjecture and concludes that mindful eating can potentially reduce emotional and binge eating.

Improved Digestion

One of the most significant disadvantages of increased stress levels is that it negatively affects your digestive systems and can promote conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).

As we have already seen how mindful eating can help reduce stress, limit overeating, and slow down meals, we can conclude that mindful eating also helps improve the digestive system and avoid digestion-related disorders.

Healthier Food Choices

Once you become more conscious of how the food you eat affects your emotional, mental and physical well-being, you will automatically be inclined to make healthier food choices and swap out your old unhealthy foods for more nutritious alternatives.

As we know, mindful eating will also help you stop overeating, binge eating, and emotional eating, and instead, concentrate more on eating only when you are hungry. As a result, you might choose foods that make you feel better after meals rather than feeling too full, bloated, and lethargic.

The Best Food for Mental Health

Focus on consuming a lot of vegetables and fruits as well as foods that contain generous amounts of omega-3 fatty acids, like salmon, to improve your mental health. Particularly healthy for the brain are dark green leafy veggies. Also great for the brain are nuts, seeds, and legumes like beans and lentils.

Here are some readily available foods you should include in your diet to improve your mental health:

Chicken

Tryptophan-containing lean proteins such as chicken and turkey are delectable options that aid your body in producing serotonin. Serotonin is a happy hormone essential for your brain’s ability to regulate mood, combat depression, and keep sharp memory.

Salmon

Salmon is the healthiest type of fish and contains high levels of omega-3 fatty acids. Omega-3s are widely known to be helpful against mental conditions such as anxiety and depression and have also been shown to improve memory and cognition.

Salmon contains generous concentrations of vitamin D, which also helps reduce the likelihood of depression. Tuna, mackerel, and herring are some other fish options that have significant Omega-concentrations.

Whole Grains

Whole grains consist of foods such as wild rice, oats, soy, beans, etc., which contain complex carbohydrates. Unlike simple carbs, complex carbs produce glucose at a slower rate, providing your body with a more uniform and consistent energy supply without causing a spike in your blood sugar levels.

Eating whole grains also improves your brain’s absorption of the amino acid tryptophan. As such, combining whole grains with foods such as turkey and chicken can enhance brain functioning while alleviating symptoms of depression and anxiety.

Avocados

Avocados are packed with folate, vitamin K, and lutein, all of which help reduce your risk of stroke, improve your focus and memory, and boost brain functioning.

Spinach

Leafy greens such as spinach are great sources of folic acid for the brain, a substance that has been proved to be a powerful antidepressant. Additionally, it aids in the fight against sleeplessness, which is strongly associated with cognitive decline and can lessen dementia in senior citizens.

Yogurt

Yogurt and its derived products are rich in probiotics which are frequently linked to digestion and have been found to help people feel less anxious and stressed.

Yogurt is also a good source of potassium and magnesium, both of which help improve the oxygen supply to the brain, thereby improving its functioning.

Key Lesson

Mindful eating is the practice of maintaining complete presence and awareness during eating and using all five of your senses to understand what you are eating, why you are eating, and how the food makes you feel physically and emotionally. Adopting this practice can help curb overeating, emotional eating, binge eating, and help you lose weight, and reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and tackle other mental and emotional disorders.

Embracing mindfulness while eating and adding nutritious foods to your diet such as the ones outlined above can help you alleviate a range of physical and mental problems and live a healthier life. We hope you’ll take heed of the teachings in this article and work to improve your eating habits.