YOUR GUIDE TO MINDFUL EATING: Improve Your Relationship With Food

One of the BEST ways to improve our eating habits and our relationship with food is not to diet or to restrict ourselves, it’s to simply become more aware of our thoughts, environment and hunger cues! 

If you’re looking to improve your relationship with food and/or create healthier habits around nutrition, then we’ll be focusing on 5 different Mindful Eating techniques that you can learn, think about and even try out yourself! 

In such a busy and distracting world that we live in, for many, eating has become a mindless act - we’re simply not focusing on what we’re eating, why we’re eating, how it tastes/smells/looks and most importantly, how it makes us feel both mentally and physically.  

In this guide, I will be highlighting 5 different techniques for you to explore in hopes of helping you slow down to enjoy and appreciate your food even more, while also helping you bring your mind and body back together.

What Is Mindful Eating? 

Mindful Eating evolved from theories of mindfulness, which teaches us to slow down, to live in the moment and to pay closer attention to our actions, thoughts and feelings.

With Mindful Eating, we’re turning inwards and paying closer attention to our intentions - the why and how compared to diets which focus more on the how much to eat, what to eat and even the when. 

Benefits 

In general, mindful eating can lead to choosing more nutritious and wholesome foods but it can also:

• Increase enjoyment & appreciation of food
• Improve digestion
• Weight management
• Create a more positive relationship with food and oneself 
• Prevent overeating

Personally, (and I’m by no means perfect at mindful eating) as the "Queen of Snacking", especially because I work from home and food is always accessible, mindful eating has really helped me to slow down and think before I eat, “am I actually hungry or am I just [bored/stressed/sad]?” This alone has made a huge difference in my eating habits and I’m so excited for some of you to potentially discover techniques that can really help you too!

Technique 1: Slowing Down

Slowing down is one of the best ways we can get our mind and body in sync! 

Eating too quickly often leads to overeating since your brain doesn’t have enough time to receive "fullness signals", which are controlled by hormones.

After a meal, your gut suppresses your hunger hormone known as ghrelin, while also releasing fullness hormones, such as leptin. These hormones tell your brain that you have eaten, making you feel full and cues you to stop eating.

This process takes approximately 20 minutes! If you are eating too quickly, you will bypass these signals and continue to eat until you feel really full.

 There's so many simple ways you can apply "slowing down" to your meals: 

• Sit down to eat at a table (not a couch, in the office or in bed)
• Set your fork down between bites 
• Count how many times you normally chew a bite of food, then double that amount
• Use a timer: set a timer for 20 minutes and try not to finish before the timer goes off
• Take deep breaths: if you notice you’re eating quickly, sit back and take a couple deep breaths to help get yourself back on track
• Turn off any distractions such as the TV or your phone 
• Set an intention before you eat each meal. For example, “During this meal, I will slow down and savour each bite” or “I will chew every bite of food X amount of times"
• Drink a sip of water between each bite
• Smell your food, both before and during: look at your food, smell it as it enters your mouth, listen to how it sounds as you chew it, feel its chewy or mushy texture

Give any (or all) of these strategies a try this week! Finding what works for you takes a little bit of experimentation until you finally find the perfect strategy that ‘clicks’.

Technique 2: Listen To Your Hunger Cues 

True mindful eating is tuning into our bodies and listening to our hunger signals. 

Are you actually hungry or are you just responding to an emotional want? 

Our brain is great at playing tricks on us - what we think we want, is actually not what we need and that’s why I’m going to try and encourage you to pay closer attention to your body instead of your mind. 

This can be tricky for most people because there’s truly a fine line between, “that looks SO good” and “I need food for energy” i.e., you're actually hungry!  

Or perhaps you’re an emotional eater - rather than eating when you feel frustrated, stressed out, sad or even just out of boredom, can you slow down, turn a little more inwards to process your emotions and listen to your body? 

Confront your emotions. Check in and ask yourself, what is truly the problem? What's causing you to feel sad/emotional/angry/upset? What do actually need in this moment that will help you feel better?

If you are actually hungry, you will experience hunger signals such as:

• Stomach growling
• Low energy
• Challenges focusing
• Feeling light-headed

I know, I know - easier said than done when you’re feeling really stressed and all you want to do is eat a pile of chocolate or ice cream, but I'm going to challenge you with one thing and that’s to pause before you head into the kitchen and to confront your emotions. Are you really hungry?  Instead of reaching for food to comfort you, try going for a walk, drinking a tall glass of water, calling a friend or practice deep breathing. 

Mini Assignment: Take 2 minutes to jot down what your body's hunger signals are and what your emotional hunger triggers are (if any).

Technique 3: Attend to your plate 

Distracted Versus Focused Eating 

If any of you are like me, then you’re the king or queen of multitasking - you’re replying to text messages, the TVs on, you’re talking to your spouse/kids/friend about your day AND having dinner. 

By the time you’re done replying to your messages, you look down at your plate and voila - your food has vanished and you’re asking where it went!

As we discussed in our previous technique, true mindful eating is tuning into our bodies and listening to our hunger signals. Multitasking and eating is the recipe for not being able to tune in deeply to our body’s signals and needs, including those fullness cues. 

The truth is, we do live in a busy world so it might not always be possible to sit in silence with just you and your food. However, we can still pull various mindfulness tactics into each meal, such as slowing down, putting the fork down between bites, putting the phone away, setting an intention and doing one thing at a time. 

Mini Assignment: during your next meal, I want you to turn all of your distractions off and let it just be you and your food (and of course any company you may have with you!). Take your time, enjoy and savour each bite and listen deeply to your body. 

Technique 4: Creating a Mindful Kitchen 

Does your kitchen encourage healthy eating? The way we set up our kitchen affects and influences our daily choices. 

By no means am I saying purge your entire kitchen of all of your chocolate and goodies (that’s zero fun and we should all be able to enjoy the things we love) but is it set up in a way that healthy and nourishing foods are readily available? Is your kitchen aligned with your goals, your health vision and what you’re trying to achieve? 

Having a ‘mindful kitchen’ is organizing it in a way so it encourages you to make healthier choices. If you have a bowl of candy on the counter but you have fresh fruit and veggies stuffed at the bottom of your fridge drawers, what do you think you’re more likely to eat? Probably the candy that’s easily accessible. 

When it comes to building habits and improving your nutrition, you want to make your habits obvious. For example, one of my goals is to eat an apple every day but it’s never top of mind, in essence, it’s not a habit…yet! So instead of keeping them buried in the fridge, I keep them in a bowl on the kitchen island where I can SEE them. Seeing the apple makes it way more likely for me to eat it. This is what I call setting yourself up for success and making your goals obvious!

Consider what you’re bringing into your kitchen. I don’t believe in “willpower” but I do believe in having strategies. For example, if I bring home chocolate I know I’m not just going to eat “one piece a day”, I’m going to eat the whole dang thing! So for me, I don’t keep chocolate in the house regularly (strategy) and I don’t feel restricted at all because if I’m really craving it, I will give myself permission to have it and enjoy it to its FULLEST. 

Mini Assignment: I want you to observe your kitchen - is it aligned with your goals? Do you have lots of fresh ingredients handy? Do you need to go grocery shopping so you can make nourishing meals?  What kinds of foods are in sight? Are healthy ones handy?

Technique 5: Daily Food Planning 

Many of you have probably experienced this if you're a member at MOVEHAPPY, but when you have an exercise plan with your set days and times, you are probably WAY more likely to do it! So when it comes to eating and your meals, what if you treated it the same way? 

I’m not suggesting that you should plan every single meal and snack for the entire week (although some people do!) but what if you just started with 1 or 2 days at a time? 

This could be as simple as taking 10 minutes the night before to plan and write down a couple of your meals and snacks for the day. Not only will this bring more awareness to your diet and what you’re consuming but it may also lead to healthier and more nutritious choices. 

We all know that having an exercise plan increases our likelihood of doing it and so can having a food plan! 

A food plan might look as simple as this (this is just an example): 

• Breakfast: Eggs, avocado & toast 
• Lunch: Veggie wrap and a caesar salad 
• Dinner: Chicken & veggie stir-fry with rice 
• Snacks: nuts, yogurt & berries, sliced apples & PB, crackers & cheese 

This little preplaning that takes very little time can take so much pressure off of trying to figure out what to eat every day, enhance your awareness of what you’re eating on the daily and help you better prepare to make healthier choices.

Try not to put pressure on yourself by trying to be "perfect" every day - around here there’s no such thing as perfection, only progress!

I know, I probably left you with a lot to think about and with so many different strategies to try out. If you're feeling overwhelmed, try just jotting down 1 or 2 techniques that resonated with you and ones you'd like to apply and focus on those 2 only.