Mindful Eating: how to stop from overeating, enjoy your food more, and cultivate gratitude in the present moment

Mindful eating is a popular phrase these days. And for good reason: it can be an incredibly useful tool for bringing about positive changes in your life. Mindful eating can help train your mind in qualities like awareness, gratitude, acceptance, and even kindness. It can help you enjoy your food more, and prevent you from overeating as you become more in tune with your internal body cues of being full. More importantly, mindful eating gives you an opportunity to understand your relationship with food and potentially transform unwholesome behaviors you might have around eating.

Mindful eating is fundamentally about being aware of your experiences of eating. (For a deeper exploration of what mindfulness is in general, click here). If you’ve ever thought about giving mindful eating a try, but don’t know where to get started, this post will be your guide. I’ve compiled a list of some of the most useful tips to help you master mindful eating.

Before we get started, let’s get something straight. When you first start practicing mindful eating, there is a good chance you will feel some agitation and restlessness. Be patient with yourself if this happens, and don’t expect to feel bliss from eating your banana right away. Mindful eating is simple, but it’s not always easy, especially in the beginning.

Without further ado, here are 5 key tips for practicing mindful eating:

Tip #1. Eliminate major distractions

Since mindful eating is about bringing your attention to the experience of eating, distractions can be one of the major barriers to doing it well. Just think about how we normally eat our meals: put the plate in front of us, check email, watch tv, browse Facebook, compile to-do lists, or chat with friends. How often are we really present with our food for when we do these things? Maybe the first bite, or first two bites. When you practice mindful eating, see if you can avoid all your electronics, or really anything that might distract you from your food. Don’t check your phone, even if it buzzes (I recommend airplane mode), don’t open your computer, and don’t turn on the tv, don’t even listen to the radio. If possible, see if you can find a place where you won’t have to talk to anyone (or listen to anyone talking). This will give you the opportunity to bring all of your attention to your eating. Of course you can do mindful eating when any of these distractions are present, but it takes practice to do that without getting lost in the distraction. In the beginning, it’s even more important to set the right conditions. In short, simplify as much as possible.

Tip #2. Engage all 5 senses (even before you start eating)

You can fully enjoy your meal before you even take the first bite. Do this by engaging all five of your senses when you first sit down in front of your food. We often just focus on the taste of food, but food can be experienced through seeing, touching, smelling, and hearing as well. You can see the vivid colors and shapes of the food you’re about to eat. You can smell your food, bringing all your attention down into your nose. You can feel the texture through your fingers (like when you peel an orange, or lift a fork). You can even hear the sound your food makes when you move it around your plate or when you finally take a bite. Of course, once you do start eating, try to savor each bite. See how the taste changes as you chew.

Tip #3. Put the fork down!

One of the keys to eating mindfully is to try eating just one bite at a time. Often we are looking for our next bite while there’s still food in our mouth! For example, when I have a cookie, I’ll take a bite, chew once or twice, and then immediately start eyeing the cookie to see where to place my next bite. In that moment, while I am looking for the next thing, I am no longer enjoying the taste of the cookie. My mind is saying, “Give me more! Before the happy feeling goes away! I need another piece cookie in my mouth RIGHT NOW.” Do you see what’s going on here? When that happens, I am not cultivating contentment and gratitude, but rather I am cultivating the mental habit of greed. Mindfulness asks us to train our mind in the mental habit of contentment; learning how to enjoy what is here in the present moment. One way to help accomplish this is to put the utensil down while you chew, so you’re not fishing around your plate preparing for the next bite. If it’s a cookie, or any other handheld food, simply put the food down. Don’t pick it back up until you’ve chewed completely and swallowed what is in your mouth. You may even want to pause a moment before taking another bite. Slowing down will help you be more present.

Tip #4. Notice how you feel – label your emotions

One of the benefits of mindful eating is that we can gain some insight into our emotional world. To do this, simply check in with how you’re feeling from time to time when you eat. Use the labelling technique to identify your emotions. One of the key aspects of mindfulness is non-judgmental awareness. See if you can cultivate acceptance of whatever emotions arise while you eat. This is particularly great to do before you start eating. Are you feeling stressed? Happy? Excited? Sad? Bored? Overwhelmed? Try closing your eyes and then asking yourself “How do I feel right now?”. When you label an emotion that you’re feeling, you get less caught up in it, and so you have more space to simply be present, rather than lost in emotional reactivity. The more you practice this, the more self-aware you become.

Tip #5. Know that slowness is not the goal

It’s important to keep the end goal in mind when practicing anything (in order to get somewhere, it helps to know where you want to go). In mindful eating, the goal is not to see who can be the slowest eater in the room. A snail might eat slowly, but it doesn’t mean it’s being mindful! Instead, what we are trying to do is cultivate more awareness of all of our experiences while eating, and also bring more kindness into our hearts and minds. When you get good at mindful eating, it doesn’t have to “look” like mindful eating. You can eat at a normal pace, with distractions all around, because you have already cultivated the skill of paying attention while eating, with patience, gratitude, and kindness.

Try mindful eating whenever you can over the next few days. Breakfast is a good time, since it’s easy to be alone, but pick whenever works best for you. Then come back and let me know how it went!