Making Peace with Your Food

Think back to the last meal you ate.

Can you think of what different taste and textures your meal had and what you were doing while you were eating? Where was your attention drawn to? How did you feel physically and emotionally before, during and after your meal? The practice of bringing awareness to these different aspects of eating a meal is known as mindful eating.

Mindful eating and mindfulness are closely interconnected with another, mindful eating being a subtle part of the practice of mindfulness. To understand how to practice eating mindfully, we must go back further to understand mindfulness. To be mindful, is to be part of the present moment with the acceptance of your surroundings. When we are mindful, we allow ourselves to just simply be and when we can simply be while eating, we can be intuitive about our eating lifestyle and find peace with our food.

Unfortunately, within society, we have a social norm of living a multi-tasking lifestyle with constant distractions and things to fill our mind with. Commonly, when we eat throughout the day, we may find ourselves multi-tasking during a meal or snack. Perhaps you may even find yourself commonly eating while driving, working, and scrolling on your phone.

By improving our mindfulness while eating, we are more likely to pay attention to our physical hunger cues versus our emotional hunger cues and pay attention to what foods our bodies really enjoy and even possibly dislike. Aside from honoring our intuitive mind with eating, practicing mindfulness can shift from a diet culture mentality into a body acceptance mindset.

Below are five suggestions on ways we can practice finding peace while eating with mindfulness!

1) Take a moment to find a full breath (inhale and exhale) before eating a meal or snack.

2) Check your physical hunger level from a scale of 1-10

3) Place any phone or device down during the duration of the meal and notice any thoughts that come up while eating

4) Set down any utensil in between bites, maybe observing the hunger scale again

5) List observations from your meal using all five senses

References:

1) Nelson, J. B. (2017). Mindful eating: The art of presence while you eat. American Diabetes Association, 3, 171–174. https://doi.org/10.2337/ds17-0015

This blog post is not intended to replace medical advice. Always speak to your health care provider for any advice and questions you may have regarding a medical condition.