Did you know that more mindful eating could help benefit everything, from your digestion, to your mental wellbeing, and even your body weight? Here Emma Thornton explains how to implement these practices in three easy steps:
- Chew well
- Eat slowly
- Eat fresh
What exactly is mindfulness?
Technically, mindfulness is a gentle form of meditation in which you aim to become more “aware” of your surroundings. Much like the 5,4,3,2,1 technique for calming anxiety, it aims to put you in the moment, helping you become more aware of your immediate surroundings, focusing on and making the most of the positives around you.
Why mindful eating?
Mindfulness can be practised more generally and it has helped thousands of people to live more intentionally and develop the skills necessary to manage various conditions including chronic pain, depression and sleeping problems. Mindful eating is an approach to eating that fulfils the criteria necessary in changing one’s overall approach to eating. This means practising mindfulness, and more specifically in regards to your food shopping, meal planning, cooking and, of course, eating!
Diets often fail because you can become too focused on the “rules of eating”, and because they are outcome-focused rather than process-oriented, as mindful eating is. With mindful eating you focus on the process, and it can help you savour the moment and your food, and encourage your full presence, in order to enhance the whole eating experience. The main focus is not to lose weight – although it is highly likely that those who adopt this style of eating will also lose weight, because with a mindful approach the person’s choices often are to eat less, enjoy the flavours, and select foods consistent with desirable health benefits.
Mindful eating isn’t just for fun, of course. Research is starting to suggest it could also have an array of lovely health benefits including benefits on digestion, improvements in mental health, and benefits on body composition, including weight loss.
Re-establishing pride in our food and really enjoying every mouthful is something that we should work on. Unfortunately, this is something that has been lost, almost beyond recognition, by many. Nowadays, the average percentage of income spent on food in the UK is amongst one of the lowest in the EU. This is a gradual decline that has happened over some years.
Nowadays, eating is also often done as quickly as possible and barely even noticed amongst the barrage of screens and other distractions we have going on. In order to get back to healthy, helpful eating, we need to take some time and effort to focus on and enjoy cooking as well as eating.
How can you implement mindful eating?
Chew well
The first step towards eating mindfully is chewing well. Chewing is automatic and everyone knows how to do it, right? Well, the fact that it’s so automatic might just be the problem! Most of us tend to chew far too quickly and not anywhere near as thoroughly as we should. Chewing well means chewing each mouthful for at least 20 chews. Practically, this will help to support your digestion, improve satiety (fullness), and allow for better absorption of nutrients from your food.
From a mindfulness point of view, chewing well gives you more time to enjoy your food by noticing every last flavour and texture rather than bolting it down and barely letting it touch the sides of your mouth – where’s the appreciation in that?
Handily, chewing properly also gives us more time to breathe. As mindfulness stems from a form of meditation, it is important to put attention on this. Breathing in-between mouthfuls can help you relax further and really get into the “rest and digest” state that your body needs in order to benefit from the food and digest it thoroughly.
My self-care tip: chew well in order to be mindful.
Chewing is not only beneficial for digestion, but also an important part of mindful eating.
Eat slowly
This step and chewing really go hand-in-hand, but still, my advice is to consciously take more time over your meals. By slowing your meals down, you can experience lots of benefits that you might not have been used to getting.
There are some key benefits – the enjoyment factor is one (we’ll go into this in a little more detail further on in the blog) and the other one is how much you eat, as well as patterns of hunger and satiety. For many of us, bolting our food down too quickly can leave us feeling fuller than we’d like. For some, this can go on to scupper meals later in the day, meaning we can get into an unhelpful pattern of eating too much or too little, for much of the time.
By eating slowly and purposefully you can learn to become more aware of your body’s natural signals that tell you to stop eating before you become overly full. This can have benefits not only on your body composition, but also on your mental wellness – for example, for those who struggle with feeling guilty after episodes of overeating. Healthier habits can be encouraged all-round with something so simple!
Eat Fresh
Whilst mindful eating is in no way a strict diet plan, it can help to get you into healthier routines which will ultimately have their benefits on areas such as body weight. There are no radical changes involved, just simple changes of focus and slowing down and switching your mindset to a more positive one when it comes to food.
As part of mindful eating, considering what you are putting into your body and what effects this may have on your health are all-important. This is why eating healthy fresh foods, and cooking your own food as much as possible, are such an important part of it. The self-satisfaction from the cycle of cooking your own food, enjoying eating it, plus benefiting health-wise shouldn’t be underestimated.
Recently, lockdown has had a bit of a negative impact on food security. For some, it manifested through panic buying and stocking up on shelf-stable, processed food items. Unfortunately, these are the very types of foods that are more likely to encourage mindless eating, as people don’t tend to take so much pride in them and simply eat them to fuel themselves rather than for their nutritional values.
Whilst the current situation is hard to control, mindful eating, to some degree, can still be implemented for most. Even if you’re able to make a delicious meal from scratch just once daily, marvel at the ingredients you’ve put together into a meal. When you focus and mindfully choose to take your time in eating one thing over another, it could make all the difference.
By Emma Thornton, Qualified Nutritionist at A.Vogel
