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Our mental state affects our eating habits. It’s difficuly to separate our eating habits from our mental state, because emotions, thoughts and beliefs clearly influence what we put in our mouths—for better or for worse.
If you want to bring more focus to your diet, or if you want to disentangle yourself from harmful beliefs about food, you may find that a intuitive or mindful eating approach could help you.
The methods bear some similarities but have distinct histories and differences in everyday use.
What Is Mindful Eating?
Eating mindfully means paying attention to the tastes, textures and other sensations in your body when you eat. Rather than judging yourself for enjoying something or feeling guilty about eating something forbidden, you accept yourself as you are and listen to your body's signals.
Mindful eating can also help you tune into what you really want and give your body what it needs—whether it's a big steak or a handful of nuts.
There are a lot of benefits to mindful eating, including:
- Becoming more aware of how food makes you feel during and after a meal.
- Gaining an understanding of which foods you enjoy eating and which ones you dislike.
- Enjoying your food more, feeling more satisfied when you're done and feeling more pleasure from eating.
- Increasing your appreciation and gratitude for your food.
- Being able to cope with non-physical reasons for eating (e.g., emotions).
- Feeling less guilty and shameful around food.
How do we incorporate mindfulness while eating?
It can be difficult to be mindful during an entire eating experience, so when you first start out, take a moment with each bite to check with your body. Feel the food move around your mouth as you chew, and enjoy it slowly.
When you eat, give your full attention to the experience of eating. Any distractions (e.g. doing work, being on your phone, watching TV) can prevent you from noticing the signals your body sends you about what it needs and wants.
Whenever you are about to eat something, ask yourself:
- How am I feeling right now?
- Am I calm, stressed, anxious or relaxed?
- What is motivating me to eat right now?
- Am I physically hungry or am I craving something specific?
- Am I eating because I don’t have time to eat later?
- Where has this food come from?
- As you eat, take a moment to appreciate the privilege of having access to food. How does this food taste?
- What do I enjoy about this food?
- How hungry or full do I feel? Do I feel satisfied after eating or should I go back for more?
What is Intuitive Eating?
When we’re young, our bodies tell us when we’re hungry and when we’ve had enough to eat. However, when we get older, dieting messages, rules about finishing our food before leaving the table and nutrition education can make us forget our body’s cues.
Intuitive Eating is a programme that teaches us how to reconnect with those cues and lets us trust ourselves again when it comes to food. It includes mindful eating principles but also helps us let go of fear and judgment around food so we can find true satisfaction and peace when eating.
A growing body of research shows that intuitive eating can lead to many benefits including: improved self-esteem, body image and body appreciation; decreased rates of emotional eating and disordered eating; improved emotional coping skills; higher HDL cholesterol levels and lower triglyceride levels; greater satisfaction in life.
The Intuitive eating programme is based on ten core principles:
• The first step to greater health and well-being is to reject the diet mentality.
• Honour your hunger: learn to trust and respect it.
• Make peace with food: stop fighting yourself at mealtime.
• Challenge the food police: give up their harsh rules about what you should eat and how much you should weigh.
• Discover your satiation factor: find out how to tell when you're full.
• Feel your fullness: use all your senses—sight, smell, touch, taste—to help you recognise when you've had enough to eat.
• Cope with your emotions with kindness.
• Learn to replace self-hatred and loathing with self-compassion and acceptance.
• Move more: feel the difference between moving gently.
• Being active in order to build healthy muscles and bones, instead of building body fat.
• Honour your health by making gentle nutritional choices based on what truly nourishes you instead of dieting.
Key Takeaway
Understanding the difference between intuitive and mindful eating is helpful, as they are not necessarily interchangeable. They are different in content, application and process. Eventually, neither of these concepts is a diet or weight-loss tool nor should they be marketed as such.
Intuitive and Mindful eating can help you become more in tune with your body and trust what it tells you about hunger and fullness cues. The benefits of mindful eating are not only physical but also emotional and mental.
Ultimately, both methods (intuitive and mindful eating) can help you feel in control of your relationship with food, and the benefits of this renewed relationship with food can help you in the rest of your life.
