Do you ever feel that your eating is out of control and that maintaining your optimal weight is a hopeless task? Have you tried all kinds of diets but can’t seem to keep the weight off? Mindful eating may be the key that will finally allow you to be in control of your weight.
Mindful eating is an application of the discipline of mindfulness meditation, which is based on the art of paying attention. By teaching us to systematically pay attention, mindfulness meditation allows us to be more in touch with our body. When we begin to apply the principles of mindfulness meditation to the experience of eating, we discover that our body can actually help us regulate our eating, if we just learn to listen to the messages it’s giving us.
Our body is designed with many different systems, each carrying out different tasks. Many of these systems contain feedback loops, which, assuming we’re basically in good health, allow our body to let us know how it’s doing, so we can take appropriate action to keep our body in balance.
In the case of eating, the feedback loop allows our body to let us know when we need to eat and when we’ve eaten enough. When our body needs nourishment, a signal is activated and we experience the feeling we call hunger. This feeling is our body’s way of letting us know that we need to eat. Once we’ve eaten enough to provide nourishment to our body, another signal is triggered, causing us to experience the feeling we call being full. This feeling is our body’s way of telling us that it’s had enough and we should stop eating. Through the signals of feeling hungry and feeling full, our body allows us to regulate our eating to make sure that we maintain an appropriate level of physical nourishment so that our body has enough energy to do all the things it needs to do.
Once we learn to be aware of our body’s signals, it’s much easier to eat the appropriate amount to maintain our optimal weight. The problem is that we’re often only vaguely aware of the feelings we experience during eating, so we can’t properly listen to the signals our body is giving us. Sometimes, when our body is signalling to us to stop eating, we keep on eating. At other times, we think we’re feeling hungry when in reality our body is giving us a completely different signal, such as feeling bored, stressed or nervous. As a result, we often end up eating much more than our body needs, which can lead to unwanted weight gain.
So how do we use mindful eating to take control of our eating? As an introduction, try the following experiment. Take a few raisins and hold them in your hand, imagining that you’re seeing a raisin for the very first time. Take one of the raisins and carefully look at it. Notice its color, texture and size, as well as any thoughts that may come up in your mind. Now bring it to your nose and gently sniff it, as if you have no idea what a raisin smells like. Slowly bring the raisin to your mouth, gently open your mouth and place the raisin inside. Begin to slowly chew the raisin, noticing how it feels as the raisin moves between your teeth and the taste envelops your mouth. Pay attention as you feel the impulse to swallow, and gently swallow. Now that you’ve finished eating the first raisin, you can repeat the steps with the second raisin, and so on with the third.
This little experiment shows you what it means to be aware of the experience of eating. Once you’ve tried it with a few raisins, you can gradually get used to being more aware of your body’s messages surrounding eating. For example, the next time you think you feel hungry, instead of immediately taking a snack, stop for a minute and pay attention to the feeling. Ask yourself if it’s really hunger, or perhaps it’s just boredom or stress. If it’s not hunger, then you can deal with the feeling in a different way, rather than eating. With time and practice, you’ll find that you can control your eating, rather than your eating controlling you. At that point, it’s much easier to maintain your ideal weight and feel great about it!
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