Do you find yourself eating lunch in front of the computer while trying to finish a spreadsheet? Maybe you try to eat in your car while driving and checking email on your iPhone? What about reading the back of a cereal box while eating? Or how about this scenario: you’re famished after work, you plop down in front of the TV with a selection of snacks that you think you can’t possibly finish, and then, poof! All of a sudden you are in a food coma unable to remove yourself from the couch. The food is gone, just traces of crumbs, and you are left without recollection of eating or enjoying your meal.
If you can associate with any of these situations, you are not alone, we all do it. “We eat mindlessly,” says Jan Chozen Bays, author of * Mindful Eating: A Guide to Rediscovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship with Food. She says that “The fundamental reason for our imbalance with food and eating is that we've forgotten how to be present as we eat.”
Many of us have a lot to juggle and we are constantly multi-tasking, including when we eat. Or we use food as a way to “numb-out” from emotional pain or a handful of other reasons. But when we are not present with our food, we not only disconnect from our food, but from ourselves.
When we start paying attention to our food when we are eating—when we eat “mindfully”—we not only enjoy our food more, but we connect to ourselves, and our ability feel satisfied, rather than full. One of the coolest things about mindful eating is that we learn to hear our body’s huger and satiation cues. The best way I can describe it is like when you have a friend that listens to you really well—they know you so much better, and it just feels good when someone listens to you. So why don’t we do this for ourselves? Well, we can. Mindful eating and mindfulness in general, helps us to learn to listen to ourselves better and be better to ourselves so we can be better for everyone around us.
How to Eat Mindfully?
1. Start by sitting alone with your food. No music, TV, reading materials.
2. Then pay attention to the flavor, texture, aroma, temperature and sound of your food.
3. After taking a few bites, pay attention to the body. Are you still hungry? Are you full? Where are these sensations taking place in the body?
4. After playing with this for a while, we can play with how full we feel and what that means to us. What does half-full or 80% full feel like?
5. Make sure to pay attention to the mind. Don’t push your thoughts away; just name what is happening, like “this is just a thought being known.” Just because you think about looking at TV doesn’t mean you have to watch it—it’s just a thought, and like all thoughts it will rise and fall like a breath. Notice the impulse and return to just eating. But if you don’t, try not to judge or criticize yourself. You can try again later, or even in the next moment.
After practicing mindful eating for a while, you’ll notice how you are more aware of not only your hunger and satiation, but of how you are sensitive to specific foods or food combinations, times you eat, and how emotions affect your eating. If you are an emotional eater, it will become easier to catch yourself trying to sooth yourself with food, and eventually, with time, you will learn to make different choices.
Keep in mind that habits are just that, habits, they are not who you are, but they are also hard to change and take time. So be gentle with yourself and the process and remember that lasting change is built on many small changes. And just making the decision to make a change is the first step.
If you are interested in giving it a go, here is some “homework” from Jan’s Blog on Psychology Today:
(1) Try taking the first four sips of a cup of hot tea or coffee with full attention?
(2) If you are reading and eating, try alternating these activities, not doing both at once? Read a page, then put the book down and eat a few bites, savoring the tastes, then read another page, and so on.
(3) At family meals, you might ask everyone to eat in silence for the first five minutes, thinking about the many people who brought the food to your plates.
(4) Try eating one meal a week mindfully, alone and in silence. Be creative. For example, could you eat lunch behind a closed office door, or even alone in our car?
(2) If you are reading and eating, try alternating these activities, not doing both at once? Read a page, then put the book down and eat a few bites, savoring the tastes, then read another page, and so on.
(3) At family meals, you might ask everyone to eat in silence for the first five minutes, thinking about the many people who brought the food to your plates.
(4) Try eating one meal a week mindfully, alone and in silence. Be creative. For example, could you eat lunch behind a closed office door, or even alone in our car?
No comments:
Post a Comment