One of the core principles of mindful living is being in peace with yourself, both mentally and physically. This is why healthy eating is such an important part of your path towards true mindful living.
Today we will discuss what mindful eating is, how to implement its principles practically and how all this could help one feel better about themselves and be healthier, so stay tuned.
What is Mindful Eating
There is no one way to describe mindful eating, but we will attempt to do that just now. Mindful eating refers to eating with all your senses engaged whereas you do not react to the food but you become aware of it.
This might sound odd as we think that we react to the taste of the food and that’s what brings enjoyment (or disgust) but mindful eating argues otherwise. This type of eating, while fully aware, is still focused on bringing you joy as eating should be an enjoyable experience and mindful living in general is not about frugality, but inner peace with oneself and pleasure.
If you try to utilise all your senses and emotions with each bite you are taking, we can assure you that you will find pleasure in food more often than you used to before. Mindful eating also teaches healthy food choices and mindfulness in the preparation of meals, thus bringing about a new sense of gratitude towards food.
How to Practice it
There are numerous teachings of mindful eating that you can implement in your daily routine which promise to make your eating experience more profound and more enjoyable. First, let’s discuss what you should not do.
Do Not’s
You shouldn’t judge your way of eating. There are many different eating behaviours and we should remember that they are the result of our different lived experiences. Some are slow eaters, others not. Some leave food on the plate when they finish, others don’t. Don’t judge yourself and don’t judge others based on how they consume food.
This is perhaps one of the most important steps for mindful eating because it concerns your relationship with food. You shouldn’t see food as a reward for a task, or as a pacifier when you’re upset, and you absolutely shouldn’t see it as a necessary evil. Once you stop judging yourself and your eating habits, you’ll see how they improve seamlessly.
Another thing you should not do is to be a mindless eater, but what is that? A mindless eater would put any food in their body just to satisfy their hunger. This means that this type of person is more likely to not eat healthily and not to enjoy the food.
This takes us to the next rule – do not starve. We understand that modern life is very busy and sometimes one might feel that they don’t have time to eat, but they do. Food should be treated like the important thing that it is, not some nuisance.
In addition, not eating for hours makes us more suspectable to eating bad food later because we don’t want to labour over the oven when we are starving.
Do’s
Now, we will give you a few steps that would help you achieve mindful eating. We hope they help you feel better about food and also about yourselves:
- Three Meals – You should have three meals a day, no matter how hard it seems at first if you are used to skipping meals. Your body and your mind require sustenance that you should provide.
- Set Meal Times – Your body is an incredibly complex mechanism that continuously strives for a routine to work efficiently, so treat it like one. Create a routine with three meals in even intervals and keep to it. You’ll notice how much better you’ll feel if you do.
- Cooking Schedule – It’s often hard to come up with healthy cooking ideas on the spot, especially if you’re hungry, so try to create a cooking schedule on Sunday to get you through the week. Don’t be afraid to swap recipes if you feel like having something else on the spot, but try to abide to the recipes in the schedule.
- Proper Size Meals – We don’t want you to count every calorie, but you should try to abide to the healthy daily calories for your age and sex. Divide these calories into three (almost) equal portions to guesstimate how much you should be having per meal.
- Eat Slowly and Chew – You shouldn’t judge yourself on your eating habits, but you should attempt to better yourself. By eating slowly and chewing, you’re allowing your body to better and faster process the food, as well as for your mouth and tongue to fully appreciate the food’s richness.
- Use Your Senses – Observe the food, look at the beautiful colours, the textures; take in the aroma and let your tastebuds explore every bite. Become fully immersed in the eating experience.
- No Distractions – To be fully immersed, means that you shouldn’t be doing anything else at the moment. It’s just you and your tasty food. You shouldn’t be watching shows or films.
