Mindful Eating as a Weight Loss Tool
Diets have a reputation for failure, and not without reason. In fact, about 80% of dieters gain the weight back after just five years.
This is because most diets don’t take longevity into account. Whether you are limiting your carbs or fats, on Atkins or Keto, what it all comes down to is eating in a calorie deficit.
But what happens once you lose the weight? Most people quit whatever restrictive diet they were on and slip right back into the habits that failed them in the first place.
Isn’t there a better way?
TeleHealthNP always recommends that you shift your mindset away from restrictive dieting to focus on creating a new lifestyle that you can sustain. The latest research tells us that cultivating mindfulness around food helps us to manage our relationship to food in a healthy way that will benefit us for life.
Common Food Triggers that Cause Overconsumption
We live in a busy culture. Our high pressure schedules lead many of us to over consume convenience foods, skip meals, and binge to ease the stress we feel from juggling it all.
Take distracted eating. How many times have you eaten at your desk or in front of the television? How many times have you ordered Door Dash or gone through a drive through because you were just too tired to cook dinner for yourself and your family?
There are other situations where food triggers cause us to overeat. The bowl of chips and salsa at your favorite Mexican restaurant or the snack table at your office party come to mind.
You may not be particularly hungry, but their simple presence in front of you causes you to reach for the bowl.
Mindless snacking has become so ingrained in our lifestyles that we rarely recognize what true hunger feels like and mistake these social triggers for hunger, sometimes overeating to the point of sickness.
The speed with which we eat can also have a big impact on how much we eat.
Satiety is triggered by hormones that are secreted by your stomach about 20 minutes after eating. When we eat too quickly, we may inadvertently overeat before our bodies even have the chance to recognize our fullness.
There is scientific reason to believe that all of this distracted eating effects our digestion as well. When we are behind the wheel of a car or eating while working, our brains don’t have time to shift out of the fight or flight response from stressors, slowing or stopping digestion entirely.
This means that for all of those extra calories, your body may not even be properly absorbing the nutrients of your meal.
What is Mindfulness?
Mindfulness is probably a term you are familiar with because it has become ubiquitous in our language, but do we fully understand the depth of what it is trying to convey?
Mindfulness was defined by University of Massachusetts Medical School professor Jon Kabat-Zinn who developed the school’s Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Program.
According to Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness is “paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.” He literally wrote the book on mindfulness, titled Full Catastrophe Living, a guidebook to using mindfulness to cope with the stress of everyday life.
Researchers have found that the practice of mindfulness helps people to manage everything from chronic pain and illness to depression, anxiety, and sleep disorders.
Mindfulness is recommended by doctors and dietitians who now know that sustainable weight loss comes not from dieting, but behavior change sustained over time.
How Mindful Eating Techniques Help with Weight Loss
If mindful eating doesn’t change your diet, what makes it so effective at helping people lose weight?
The practice of mindfulness asks you to pay closer attention to the sensations of hunger and eating, focusing not on the quantity of food but the experience of eating.
Mindfulness does not set rules around eating such as what to eat or how much to eat. Instead, it asks you to cultivate a better relationship to food and the ability to recognize your physical needs.
Mindful eating is not an effortless endeavor. Like any lifestyle change, it will take time and intention to make mindfulness a natural part of your lifestyle.
To begin, you must learn to be present and pay closer attention to your food and the experience of eating. It may involve overcoming restrictive and disordered mindsets or behaviors that are deeply ingrained and may be difficult to face.
If you do need extra support overcoming disordered eating patterns, reach out to your doctor or a mental health professional.
However, the resulting health benefits include not just a better relationship with food. Many people experience weight loss, improved blood sugar, and the reduction of weight related chronic illnesses like high cholesterol, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.
How to Adopt Mindful Eating Habits
The idea behind mindful eating is quite simple, but the practice of it involves intention and care.
It begins before you even have your plate in front of you, when you first experience hunger or a craving and continues after the last bite when you assess how you feel both physically and mentally.
The Raisin lesson
The most common entry point to understanding mindful or intuitive eating involves a single raisin. Sit down to eat this raisin with no distractions. Begin by observing how it feels to anticipate eating and how the raisin looks, smells, and feels when you hold it in your hand.
Put the raisin in your mouth and hold it there, feeling the sensation of the food on your tongue. Chew slowly, observing the texture, flavor, and how it feels in your mouth.
When you swallow, take a beat to notice the lingering flavor and reflect on your experience of eating this raisin.
This practice may feel silly at first, but it teaches you how to adopt mindfulness practices to fully experience food and how it feels to nourish your body.
Now it’s time to expand these lesson to the rest of your diet.
Tips for Making Mindful Eating a Regular Practice:
Many dietitians recommend the book The Intuitive Eating Workbook by Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch to help support you through creating these mindful habits.
Here are a few things that you can practice on your own to better your own relationship with food:
Before you eat
When you get the urge to reach for a snack, take a moment to notice how you feel and whether what you are experiencing is true hunger or a different food trigger. For more on food triggers, take a look at this past post.
If you don’t feel hungry, are you feeling another emotion like stress, anger, sadness, or simple distractedness?
If your desire is not about true hunger, is there something else you can do to comfort yourself? Some options are to take a walk, do something creative, or call a friend to chat.
When you have a plate of food in front of you, take a moment to appreciate all that it took to get that food to you. From the soil it grew in to the people who harvested, processed, shipped, and prepared your food.
While You are eating
Remove all distractions like your phone and television, or tasks like working or driving.
Eat slowly, observing the sensation of each bite, just like you did with the raisin in the first exercise.
Check in with your body periodically. How do you feel, are you full, are you still hungry?
After you are done
Take a moment to appreciate that you took time to nourish your body and provide it the fuel it needs to be strong and carry you through life.
Learn to cope with any feelings of anxiety or guilt around food, even when you make choices that aren’t in favor of your health.
Notice how it feels to be full both physically and mentally.
Exercise patience with yourself and give yourself plenty of love. Society has created a lot of difficult feelings around food and it’s okay to feel the effects of this. It will take time to make mindful eating a habit, but it’s one you will be grateful to have learned.
Wrap it Up
Eating mindfully is first and foremost a way to repair your relationship to food, eating, and your body. You do this by cultivating an intentional and kind relationship with food and eating.
The major benefit of adopting this practice is that you will better be able to recognize and adhere to your body’s natural hunger and satiety cues.
To practice mindful eating, slow down, remove distractions, and maintain loving attention to the sensations in your mind and body as you eat.
By adopting mindful eating practices, you will likely experience weight loss, better weight management, and the reversal of obesity related chronic illness.
As always, for more support, reach out to us at TeleHealthNP for individual guidance on weight loss.
References:
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