How To Be A Mindful Eater
Tips on how to control what goes in your mouth, knowing what goes on the lips may land on your hips if you’re not mindful, especially the holidays
Eating Mindfully will foster personal power and happiness in your life and transforms a healthier you. It is also having an awareness concerning food and eating with the focus of enjoying and savoring each bite.
The next time you feel a food craving think, “STOP”! Stop is an action that will give you and your brain a pause moment before you act. Stop will give you a moment to do better in terms of your eating or even better would be to add or place a stop sign on the front of your refrigerator as a reminder that you are doing what you shouldn’t be doing. This will stop you dead in your track and reinforce some self control preventing you from snacking in between meals.
Unless what you are eating is called breakfast, lunch of diner, it is call snacking. Snacking leads to even more snacking and over a repeated process eventually lead to overweight. Snacking can become a vicious cycle or pattern in your life that can easily become a go to habit upon any urging of the mind. You must learn to control your urges with your mind.
Personal power is derived from conscious eating and healthy food choices. Eating on the run while multitasking is defective to your health. Mindful eating makes you focus not only on what you’re eating but how much you’re eating or what. Often we eat in a hypnotic state, totally clueless to what has been eating or eating at the present moment. Eating Mindfully can be an acquired skill with some effort. With practice you can awaken the pleasure of eating and the joy of being in the moment.
Along with your practicing eating habits, it will improve eating behaviors, enable weight control, prevent chronic disease and foster a healthy relationship between food and yourself. Eating Mindfully is having awareness of your external and internal motivations in relation to food. Awareness leads to insight, knowledge and positive choices and making those choices is the exercise of personal power over food verses your food having power over you.
Eating Mindfully can be done in six steps easy
E-Evaluate your hunger. Are you truly hungry or tired? Are you eating as a social response? Is it a habitual time and place to eat? Be aware of why you are presently beginning to eat.
A-Assess your food. Stop, pause and really appreciate your food. How does it look and smell. How much have you served yourself?
T-Taste your food. Eat slowly and savor each bite. Relish your food and do not rush.
I-Investigate your hunger. While eating, checking in to see when full. Are you still hungry? Are you full and this is the time to stop? Make a conscious choice to note when full. Also, eating Slowly will make you feel fuller faster.
N-Notice how you feel. Note how you feel mentally and physically. Are you calm and relax or rushing lost in your thoughts, or TV. Make it a conscious moment to note when full and stop. Eating in a trance like state is a recipe to overeat. Check in with yourself after 30 to 60 minutes after eating to note if full. Notice if your food has given you energy or you wish to take a nap.
G-Gratitude for the opportunity to eat. Be grate for all things and everyone significant in providing your food. This connects you to others and establish a positive sense of well being.
When you Think Stop!! Stop
S-Stop what you’re doing
T- Take a 3 minute breathing break
O- Observe your body sensation of hunger. Rate it from 1 to 5. 1 being not too hungry and 5, very hungry. Proceed accordingly.
P- Proceed with awareness
Follow these simply steps and continuous practice you will be Eating Mindfully sooner than you would have realized. Make Eating Mindfully a habit and you will not over eat or gain weight. Knowledge is expensive but ignorance is deadly.
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