Mindful Eating, the New Weight Loss Program
Mindful eating is maintaining an in-the-moment awareness of the food and drink you put into your body. It involves observing how the food makes you feel and the signals your body sends about taste, satisfaction, and fullness. Mindful eating requires you to simply acknowledge and accept rather than judge the feelings, thoughts, and bodily sensations you observe. It can extend to the process of buying, preparing, and serving your food as well as consuming it.
Countless weight loss programs are launched every year and everyone is claiming to be easier, faster, and more effective than the other. From low carbs planning to the paleo diet, and most recently, the ketogenic diet, they all claimed to have a solution for losing a few pounds. By no means am I claiming that they do not work, in fact, I am delighted to draw one learning point from all these dieting programs – mindful eating. If we take a closer look at the concept behind the myriad of dieting plans out there, the key to reaping success from any one of them is really about conscious eating. It is about what we eat, how we eat, and why we eat. Putting aside the different ingredients and recipes, the reminder here is about paying attention, and that is what mindful living is all about.
Unconscious Eating that Leads to Weight Gain
In a world where we are tempted with an ever-growing list of “must-try” foods and beverages in the marketplace, it is not surprising that we are in the habit of buying and consuming because we are making unconscious buying decisions. Some of us probably stocked up truckloads of potato chips at home thinking that they are such delicious treats. But when it comes to appreciating them, do we really put much focus on how they taste and how our body is reacting to them? Or are we too busy focusing our attention on the television while shoving the chips down our throats? A study mentioned in the Sage Journal indicated that people make more than 200 decisions about food every day, but we can only recall a very small fraction of them. So, if we are not even conscious of what leads us to our choice of food and why we eat, the chances of overeating and weight gaining naturally increases.
It was noted in a study listed in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) that our eating behavior is often triggered by external factors rather than internal cues from our bodies. In the study with 54 participants, some of them were invited to eat from self-refilling soup bowls while others were served normal soup bowls. At the end of the experiment, those who consumed from the self-refilling bowls were reported to have consumed 73% more than those who ate from the regular bowls, but the former group of participants was unaware that they had eaten more, even though they consumed 100 calories more than the others!
Benefits of Mindful Eating
While we are focused on the hustle and bustle of everyday life, mindless eating can easily infiltrate our lifestyle. If we are not aware of our patterns, we can easily overeat and gain excessive weight even when we thought we are merely consuming regular healthy meals. Our brain takes up to 20 minutes to realize that we feel full, so if we are fast eaters, the possibility of consuming too much too fast is very likely. Needless to say, that is the first step to weight gain.
Mindful eating is a technique that helps us to gain control of our eating habits and improve weight loss. If we can exercise more mindfulness in our daily eating behavior, we can certainly cut back a lot of calories, binge-eating, and even expenditure. Mindful eating is about being fully aware of our eating behavior, our triggers, our cravings, and how our food makes us feel. If we can be conscious of our food experience; from the point of purchasing our food to the moment that we consume them, we will tend to make wiser and healthier decisions. The truth is, there is no need for any fancy expensive diet plans, all we need is to exercise mindfulness in your eating behavior.
Incorporating Mindfulness Eating in Your Daily Life
There is no need to create an ultra-strict diet plan in the name of mindful eating. Start by cultivating awareness during mealtimes. Slow down the process of eating and learn to appreciate what you are eating. Give attention to the food that you consume, acknowledge how it looks and how it tastes. Take a moment to observe how your body is reacting during eating. When you can observe what your body is trying to tell you, it will always give you subtle cues on how it feels when you eat. Is the food making you feel thirsty? Is that chunk of red meat sitting well with your stomach? Is that soda causing a reaction in your gum? When you begin to take time to observe, it will not be long before you start to gravitate towards healthier choices that will boost your metabolism and inject more fun into your eating routine.
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