5 Mindful Eating Tips

Mindful eating can be referred to as a type of mindfulness exercise whereby meditation is used to help increase awareness of your feelings, thoughts, and physical sensations in the present. Studies have shown that practising mindfulness may help improve anxiety, eating disorders, depression, and other mental conditions. 

The idea behind mindful eating is to slow down during mealtimes and pay attention to your food. Mindful eating can help to control eating habits and reduce mindless snacking by replacing instinctive actions with more conscious choices. Dieticians commonly use this technique to help people learn their fullness and hunger cues.

With that in mind, here are five benefits of mindful eating. 

Five Benefits of Mindful Eating

1. Improves Digestion – Mindful eating can improve digestion as digestive conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome can be affected by stress levels. Mindful eating may help improve digestion by lowering stress levels.
2. Helps To Make Healthier Food Choices – Being more aware of how food makes us feel may lead to healthier food choices and may also help to reduce emotional eating. 
3. Get To Know Your Eating Cues – Sitting down to have a mindful meal without distractions teaches you to learn your hunger cues and reduces binge eating. 
4. Helps With Weight Loss – Mindful eating enables you to pay attention to how much food you consume, helping to decrease mindless eating and to lose weight.
5. Increases Your Satisfaction With Food – Mindful eating practices increase your awareness of your satisfaction cues, and over time, this helps with the overall satisfaction of your food.

Now that we’ve unpacked some of the benefits of mindful eating, here are five mindful tips you can apply to your life today! 

Five Tips For The Mindful Eater

1. Ditch The Electronics – Put the smartphone and laptop away and turn off the television. These distractions make us less aware of what and how much food we consume. 
2. Practise Gratitude – Always, and we always mean, practice gratitude for the meal before you eat. Being grateful enhances our eating experience and makes us aware of how lucky we are to have a hot meal. 
3. Reflect – Reflection and gratitude go hand-in-hand. Before you eat, take a moment to reflect on your emotions and feelings. Pay close attention to how your food makes you feel and how you can improve your eating habits should you need to. 
4. Have A Seat – Avoid eating rushed or on the go. Take time to sit down and mindfully enjoy your meal. 
5. Serve Your Portions – Avoid eating from bags or boxes. Serving our food in small to medium portions on our plates helps us make better serving choices while preventing overeating. 

And that, folks, is our five tips for mindful eating. Follow Flora on social media for tasty recipes with these mindful eating tips!