Steps to a Mindful Eating Meditation

A Mindful eating meditation helps you gain control over your eating habits.

It helps in weight loss, reduces binge eating and overall, allows you to feel better.

Want to start being more mindful about eating but you’re not sure where to start?

Mindful eating is based on mindfulness, a Buddhist meditation.

Mindful eating has become a really popular topic within the world of self-discovery in recent years. However, unlike many new trends, this one isn’t a passing fad. There are genuine self-discovery and health benefits which come from incorporating mindful eating into your life.

The question is, how do you do it?

Mindful eating meditation is about developing awareness of your mental and physical cues about food.

Mindful Eating Techniques Video

Be Aware Of How You Eat

The first step to mindful eating is to simply observe your current eating habits. Don’t change anything, simply pay attention and write down what you eat, when you ate it and how you felt before and afterward. Try to do this in a non-judgmental way.

By doing this, you’ll start to discover eating habits you didn’t even realize you had. For example, some people find they tend to eat more without even realizing it, while they’re watching television. By identifying these habits, you can then work on breaking out of them.

You should ideally observe your eating habits for a week before moving on to mindful eating.

Chew your food more than 20 times

Once you’re ready to start, one of the best ways to start eating more mindfully is to chew more. Many of us don’t realize that as we eat, we often chew too quickly. The trouble with this is, the quicker you eat, the more time it takes for your body to realize it’s full.

You end up over-eating and feeling pretty bloated.

If you focus on chewing each mouthful of food more than 20 times, you’ll soon start to notice that you feel fuller much quicker. It also helps you to start actually enjoying your food too, rather than mindlessly swallowing it down.

Why not start off by seeing if you can chew each mouthful 25 times.

Schedule meals and stay away from technology when eating

Do you often eat while doing something else such as watching TV or working? If so, now’s the time to start scheduling your meals. Make sure you keep working and eating totally separate. It’s hard to be mindful as you eat when you’re focused on something else.

You’ll also want to stay away from technology. While having the TV on or scrolling through your phone may seem like a welcome distraction, that’s exactly what it is – a distraction. When we eat we should be fully focused on the food we’re putting into our mouths.

So, start scheduling meals away from technology and other distractions.

Really try to taste your food

When was the last time you really tasted the food you put in your mouth? This might sound like a stupid question, but you may be surprised to find that after the initial few bites, you actually stop tasting and enjoying your food.

Start paying attention to the different flavors. Can you identify different ingredients and really taste each mouthful? Enjoy the different textures and how the food feels in the mouth. By ensuring you’re really tasting each mouthful, you’ll start to enjoy it even more and develop a much healthier relationship with food.

Make sure you’re eating a healthy, balanced diet

One of the best things about mindful eating is it doesn’t place any restrictions on the types of food you eat. However, it’s still important to make sure you’re eating a healthy balanced diet.

Enjoy a little of the foods you love by following the 20/80 rule. This means eating 20% of the foods you really enjoy and 80% of the foods that are good for you.

These steps will really help you get started with your mindful eating meditation.

Some may take a little perseverance as bad habits can be pretty tough to break. However, you should start to notice the benefits immediately.

Remember: Mindful eating takes practice. 

Try to eat slowly, chew thoroughly, remove distractions and stop eating when you’re full, not stuffed.

Trust Your Body and Discover the Pleasure of Food with Mindful Eating

Would you like to develop a healthier relationship with food? If so, mindful eating could be the answer.

Mindfulness has been used to help treat symptoms of anxiety, stress, and depression, it focuses on helping you to remain in the present moment. Mindful eating follows the same principle – ensuring you take the time to actually taste, enjoy and pay attention to the food you’re eating.

Interested to give it a go? You need to learn how to trust your body and discover the pleasure of food with mindful eating.

Mindful Eating and its Benefits

Mindful eating isn’t a diet, it’s a meditation, an awareness of the food you are eating and how you are eating. It encourages you to pay attention to the foods you eat and appreciate the flavors, textures, and feelings the food produces. It’s about focusing on the here and now.

When was the last time you were 100% aware of what you were eating? For most of us, eating tends to become something we do on autopilot. We don’t really pay attention to each bite we take, instead, we eat as we do something else such as work or watch television.

So, what benefits does this provide? Well, to start with it enhances our experience with food. You’ll start to enjoy the food that you eat and ultimately enjoy how it makes you feel. It also helps you to learn to eat based upon the internal cues within the body.

You’ll identify triggers which may cause you to reach for unhealthy foods. You’ll learn how to control your cravings and develop trust in yourself.

These are just some of the benefits of mindful eating. Below, you’ll discover more about a couple of them – how it can help you trust your body and enhance your pleasure of food.

How does it help us to trust our body?

Do you find yourself often feeling discouraged or annoyed with yourself for giving in to your cravings? If so, this can lead you to stop trusting yourself around certain foods. It could be that bag of chips you simply can’t resist or a whole pack of biscuits you just can’t stop yourself from eating.

Mindful eating helps you to become aware of the cravings you have and more importantly, the reasons behind them. Most of us are guilty of comfort eating or giving into cravings to fulfill an emotional void. However, we also tend to have no idea that we’re actually doing it.

So, learning mindful eating can help you to understand why you eat and identify any potential triggers causing you to over-indulge. Once you do this, you’ll start to gain more control over your cravings. This really helps you to start trusting your body and giving it what it needs, rather than what you think it may want.

How can it enhance our pleasure of food?

One of the very basic benefits mindful eating has, is it really helps you to enjoy your food more. This is down to two main things – the fact it forces you to actually pay attention to the flavors and textures of the food, and the fact you eat a lot slower.

With mindful eating, it’s recommended you chew your food at least 20-25 times. Paying attention to all of the different flavors really enhances the experience.

Overall, mindful eating delivers a lot of great benefits.

Imagine how much better your life can be if you learned to trust your body and discover the pleasure of eating mindfully.

Gain more control over your eating habits today and practice mindful eating.