How To Practice Mindful Eating
Lauren Coleman is a nutritionist and personal trainer who specialises in helping people stop yo-yo dieting, improve their relationship with food and become more confident in their body at the same time. She works with clients in person and online, and hosts a podcast called A Seat at The Table.
If you’ve tried various diets with little to no success, it may be tempting to keep searching for the next one that will finally ‘work’ for you. But before you jump on yet another diet, something you might not have considered which could be the only approach you need is learning to eat more mindfully.
By definition, to eat mindfully is to apply the principles of mindfulness to the way that we eat. That is, to allow ourselves to be fully present with our sensory experience as we eat.
Mindful eating has been proven to increase motivation and decrease stress and anxiety related to dieting. This means you have less chance of ‘rebounding’ when following a mindful eating approach, and better adherence to a healthy lifestyle. (Minari, et al., 2024)
Mindful eating can also assist with weight loss, even without other dietary recommendations set in place. One study showed that people with obesity who struggled with binge eating started practising mindful eating gravitated more towards less processed foods and had fewer episodes of binge eating. This resulted in weight loss comparable to more regimented weight loss plans. (Iaccarino, et al., 2024)
Eating mindfully helps us find the link between our eating and emotions – and may encourage us to seek other ways of regulating ourselves instead of turning to food. Many of us have lost the ability to eat mindfully due to high-stress lifestyles or because we’ve lost touch with our hunger signals through chronic dieting.
Mindful eating isn’t just for people wanting to lose weight either, it is for anybody who wants to eat in a more health-focused manner, without following a ‘diet’.
Mindful eating encourages us to slow down as we eat – which allows us to pay more attention to how certain foods make us feel. When we eat more mindfully, we lean towards choosing foods that make us feel good.
So – how do we eat mindfully anyway?
5 mindful eating tips to help you get started
1. Slow down
Take time to chew your food slowly, paying attention to the taste, texture and feel of each mouthful. Put your knife and fork down partway through the meal and pause to listen to what your body is saying. Notice how each bite feels in your mouth and how your stomach begins to feel as you make your way through your meal. Giving your body time to register the food you have just eaten makes it easier to notice when you are getting full. This means we are more likely to eat until we feel satiated, without overeating.
2. Do a body scan
Before you eat, take a minute to close your eyes, take a few deep breaths and check in with how your body is feeling. Is your heart racing? Are you carrying tension anywhere? Is your stomach growling? Allow this awareness to guide your next move. Is food really something that you need right now, or would you be better off taking 5 minutes to stretch and move around? If you decide to eat, continue to check in with your body as you eat, noticing the sensations that arise. Checking in with your body before, during and after eating can help us identify when, and how much we should eat for our body’s needs.
3. Use the hunger scale
The hunger scale is a tool to help you understand your body’s hunger cues. By paying attention to how our body feels when we get hungry, we can better predict when we need to eat. Many of us struggle with mindful eating in general, because we let ourselves either get too hungry and then end up overeating, or we graze on snacks throughout the day as a way of distracting ourselves, meaning we never really get hungry to begin with. The hunger scale is a scale of 1-10, with 1 being starved, and 10 being stuffed full. Ideally, we should wait to eat until we are about a 3-4 on the hunger scale, and stop eating when we are about a 7-8. To use the hunger scale, try thinking about where you sit on the hunger scale before and after you eat – even better if you can write it down in a journal.
4. Savour the flavour
While eating, pay close attention to the taste, texture and flavour of your food. Treat your meal as if you were at a fancy restaurant, with curiosity and appreciation. When you eat mindfully, it doesn’t matter whether the dish is low in calories or carbohydrates, because you feel satisfied from the meal sooner and you are less likely to overeat. Not only that, but you will enjoy the meal more – which is how eating should be! You may even find your perceptions of which foods you enjoy begin to change. You might find yourself craving Caesar salads and feeling put off by the thought of finishing a thick slice of cheesecake. Regardless, it doesn’t matter as much which foods you choose to eat, because when you are fully present in the experience of eating, you can eat whatever you want, never feel guilty about it, and always eat the right amount for you.
5. Ask, how will this make me feel?
Sometimes we eat to deal with uncomfortable feelings like boredom, stress, anxiety or sadness – or simply out of habit and routine. Even if we are hungry, it can be hard to decide what food would be best for us. If you ever feel unsure, you can ask yourself ‘If I eat this now, how will this make me feel later?’. The answer could vary on any given day. It’s important as well to remove your preconceived ideas of what you ‘should’ opt for because that can influence whether your answer is based on how you truly feel, or just a presumption of which foods are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ for you. Sometimes, eating a doughnut might be just what you need to feel better, but sometimes you might be better off eating a balanced meal instead.
A lot of diets fall short not because of their nutritional inadequacy, but because of the stress and anxiety they can induce from being difficult to stick to. This often results in relapse and weight regain in people trying to lose weight. Since mindful eating is simple to follow, can reduce stress and anxiety, and has promising outcomes in terms of health and weight loss, it’s worth incorporating as a strategy, even if only used at one meal per day, or alongside other healthy eating guidelines.
If you are interested in learning how to eat more mindfully, but you’re struggling to get started or to stick with it – consider working with a registered nutritionist who specialises in mindful eating and intuitive eating. You can book an enquiry call with me here if you’d like to know more about what that could look like.
Read more from Lauren Coleman
Lauren Coleman, Nutritionist and Fitness Coach
Lauren Coleman is an expert in helping people overcome emotional eating, stop yo-yo dieting and re-wire their thought processes around health, nutrition, body image and exercise. She is passionate about debunking unhelpful advice about fitness and diet, making a healthy lifestyle accessible to everybody. She provides a pragmatic and science-based approach to habit change that embraces imperfect action and body appreciation – rather than perfectionism and body dissatisfaction. This results in meaningful transformation not only in how we eat, but how we feel about ourselves as well.
References:
Iaccarino Idelson P, D’Elia L, Strazzullo P. Mindful Eating Approaches to Cardiometabolic Risk Factors: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Intervention Studies. Dietetics. 2024; 3(3):271-288.
Minari TP, Araújo-Filho GMd, Tácito LHB, Yugar LBT, Rubio TdA, Pires AC, Vilela-Martin JF, Cosenso-Martin LN, Fattori A, Yugar-Toledo JC, et al. Effects of Mindful Eating in Patients with Obesity and Binge Eating Disorder. Nutrients. 2024; 16(6):884.
