Mindful Eating(not dieting) !

Mindful eating, or conscious eating, is the practice of being fully attentive to your food, your feelings, your hunger, and your satiety cues. It’s about eating consciously, engaging all senses, and acknowledging responses, feelings, and physical cues like hunger or fullness.

Mindful eating helps in making healthier food choices and developing habits that benefit both physical and mental health.

When was the last time you truly paid attention to what you were eating — when you truly savored the experience of food? Often, we eat on autopilot, chowing down a meal while our attention is on the TV or the screen of our devices or a book or a daydream.

Mindfulness invites us to remove those distractions and sit uninterrupted with our food and fellow diners. In doing so, we begin to take our time over a meal. In eating more slowly, we savor the flavors, the aromas, and the textures. We reconnect with our senses.

Everyone’s relationship to food is different in the same way everyone’s bodies are different. There is no one perfect way to eat in the same way that there is no one perfect body. We each have our own genetics, metabolisms, preferences, and priorities.

Food doesn’t just jump to the plate or from the shelves on its own. It takes a hand to reach out and choose a certain item, and, more often than not, that action is based on our thoughts and feelings around food rather than nutritional requirements or a regime or what’s good for our bodies.

Mindfulness inserts a pause to help us be aware of our own decision-making. It’s almost as though we were slowing down a recording to see our process stage by stage: the cues, the emotions that kick in, and the entire sensory impact of eating. Only when we stop to notice this chain of events can we start to change our behavior or thinking about food.

Mindful eating is not a diet. The purpose of mindful eating isn’t to lose weight or cut back on calories; the purpose is to improve your relationship with food and overall eating experience.

Knowing the negative impact of certain foods on your body doesn’t mean you have to remove those foods from your diet. With mindful eating, you can learn to enjoy the taste and feel of a single chocolate chip cookie, for example, as opposed to eating half a dozen without realizing it.

• consider the wider spectrum of the meal: where the food came from, how it was prepared, and who prepared it.

• notices internal and external cues that affect how much we eat.

• notices how the food looks, tastes, smells, and feels in our bodies as we eat.

• acknowledges how the body feels after eating the meal.

• expresses gratitude for the meal.

• may use deep breathing or meditation before or after the meal.

• reflects on how our food choices affect our local and global environment.

Mindfulness is a process-oriented, rather than an outcome-driven, behavior. It is based on an individual’s experience of the moment. The individual focuses on appreciating the experience of food and is not concerned with restricting intake. The person eating chooses what and how much to consume. It is not coincidental that, within a mindful approach, the person’s choices often are to eat less, savor eating more, and select foods consistent with desirable health benefits.

As life moves ahead, bringing discipline into what we do and how we do is equally important. Outcomes are the necessary but the journey or process is to live and remember and trying our best as we progress, even food.

Stay well, be Mindful!:)

References-Healthline/Harvard/Cleveland/Mindful/Verywell.