In honor of National Nutrition Month this March, we encourage you to practice mindful eating each time you sit down for a meal or when you consider what you want for your next meal or snack.
Mindful eating is a technique that uses mindfulness to bring attention to your eating habits, including your experience with food, your physical cues, and emotional feelings about food.
Mindful eating includes purposefully eating slowly, not allowing distractions while you eat, listening to physical hunger cues, engaging your senses and experiencing the foods you are consuming, coping with anxiety around food, and genuinely appreciating your food.
Here are six ways you can practice mindful eating today:
- Listen to your body and stop eating when you are full.
- Eat when your body tells you to (i.e. - when your stomach is growling or when your energy is low).
- Eat with others, at set times and places.
- Eat foods that are nutritionally beneficial to you.
- Just eat and focus on eating - without distractions.
- Consider where your food comes from. This may build appreciation and thoughtfulness around your meals.
By eating more mindfully, you will be able to distinguish between emotional cues and physical cues and you will increase your awareness of triggers that make you want to eat. Mindful eating allows you to slow down and recognize feelings of fullness and it can help with weight loss by changing eating behaviors and reducing the stress surrounding eating.
Remember, when you eat mindfully you feel more full; when you eat mindlessly you feel less full.