For me the term mindful eating has been wrongly appropriated by the diet industry. Diet tips often include things like ‘savour your food’, eat slowly, put your knife and fork down between bites, drink water as you eat, chew your food 20 times before you swallow.
All these things are technically mindful eating, however the way they are sold is as though if you do these things they will help you to eat less and therefore lose weight. I want to reclaim these mindful eating tools as helpful ways to train us to eat intuitively and NOT as weight loss tips.
Mindful eating is great for us in a myriad of ways. It helps us focus on our food rather than eating distractedly, it brings ceremony and importance to our meals which helps us enjoy them more and it also help us connect with the food we are eating and therefore aids our digestive process. All of these things help us tune in to our bodies more, enjoy the food we’re eating and therefore cultivate a healthier relationship with food and our bodies.
Mindful eating is an amazing way we can learn to eat more intuitively. It helps us quit dieting and stop emotionally eating.
One of the main things that happens when we emotionally eat is that we disconnect our minds from our bodies. Our minds are in distress, we are upset or angry so we turn to food. We ignore whether our body is saying it is hungry or full or whether it is craving vegetables or protein, instead we follow the part in our mind which is saying ‘feed me food that will bring instant pleasure right now’. Because we have trained ourselves to respond to our thoughts all the time there is no room to listen to what our bodies are saying. We have learnt to short circuit our own internal cues.
This is where mindful eating comes into play.
Mindful eating practices help us to reconnect our minds and bodies. When we eat more slowly and with more focus our mind relaxes it’s control and we can hear more clearly what our bodies are saying.
Binge eating is an extreme manifestation of mindless emotional eating. We want to crush down how we are feeling, or repress it before it even rears it head, so we stuff down as much food as we can. We are abusing food. Food is actually for nourishing our bodies, giving us energy and bringing a little simple joy into the experience of being alive. If we are shoving it into our mouths to forget our feelings we are purposefully using food for the opposite reasons. In order to stop binge eating we can change how we eat – the speed, the thoughts and the process – in order to reset ourselves and therefore start using food for its intended purpose.
A key tenet of mindful eating is slowing down. Put your food on a plate, eat with a knife and fork, chew your food properly before taking another bite, pause briefly periodically while you’re eating and see how your stomach feels. Slowing down is not just about being able to listen to what our stomach is saying but also what the rest of our body is experiencing.
By slowing down our eating the emotion we are trying to hide (in the case of emotional eating/bingeing) might come up to the surface. Tears might threaten to pour, a scream might rise up from the bottom of our lungs. This is what you are supposed to be dealing with. This is your body saying please stop hiding your feelings with food. If emotions rise up put the food down and honour your feelings. Honour yourself, honour your body, respect the reality of the moment.
Being more mindful with our food is another avenue to being more mindful with ourselves. Another way we can get to know ourselves better. When we get to know ourselves better, paradoxically we don’t need to hide from ourselves in food anymore. Therefore more mindful eating means less emotional eating and bingeing.