You may be aware of the word ‘mindfulness’, but the same can also be applied to your eating behaviours. Mindful eatingis the new norm for treating obesity or weight loss. It is simply eating mindfully by raising your awareness for food to prevent mindless eating in today’s busy lifestyle of everyone. The main aim of mindful eating is to augment the eating experience and adopt a fresh approach to exploring food.
Mindful eating is simply paying more attention to your eating behaviours by experiencing with all your senses like tasting, hearing, seeing, smelling and feeling. It is about noticing the emotional behaviour and physical responses that occur prior, during and after eating anything. People playing sports are now following mindful eating habits to be more aware of their food and attain better fitness.
How Mindful Eating Helps in Reducing Obesity
Mindful eating includes taking note of colours, smells, flavours and textures of food that you eat on regular basis. It includes a few mindful habits like eating slowly, thoroughly chewing, staying away from distractions and coping with negative feelings like guilt and anxiety related to food. Chewing food thoroughly not only helps in improving the digestion of your food but also solves many other health problems. Mindful eating helps in preventing overeating or binge eating. Thus, including it in your lifestyle helps in weight loss as you have better control over your excessivehunger and bad eating habits.
Few Tips for Eating Mindfully
Adopting mindful tactics for your eating behaviour will augment the enjoyment of your mealtimes, prevent excessive eating, boost digestion, reduce anxiety for food and help in establishing a good relationship with food. Here are a few essential tips to practise mindfulness while eating-
- Take your mealtime seriously and avoid eating while talking or watching television or anything else. Enjoy each bite of your meal and prioritize your eating task.
- Prevent any kind of distraction while eating like eating while sitting in front of a computer screen, while sitting in a car etc. Distractions led to mindless eating and you instantly choose unhealthy food items. You don’t enjoy your food as you are surrounded bya lot of distractions and noise. Be more aware of the situations that distract you while having your diet.
- You should only have your meal when you have enough time to enjoy the same.Don’t eat in hurry or at the time when you know you can be interrupted any time.
- Always have your meal by sitting and not while standing. Sit in a comfortable position and eat with a calm mind.
- Try to have your food served on a measurable bowl or plate and avoid eating it directly from a container, packet etc to be conscious about the quantity of food you are going to eat.
- Thoroughly chew your food and take its complete taste. This habit will prevent you from over-eating and also it improves your digestion.
- You should eat only 80 percent of your total hunger.
- Try to prepare your meal by yourself as per your taste and preferences. Mindful cooking is going to improve your relationships with your food and you will have a better understanding of taste and other things.
- Buy your grocery items by yourself after carefully analysing your taste, health and food choice.
Final Words
Mindful eating starts with noticing your body needs and hunger as well. You better know how to eat, what to eat and when to eat to achieve justifiable weight loss. You should find a comfortable place to sit to eat, smell your food carefully and look at it to stimulate your digestive system. This finally ends with a good digestive system along with reasonable weightloss.
