Think Differently About Healthy Eating Goals
Most of us have new year’s resolutions or goals to improve our eating. For some of us, it’s about improving our health. For others, it is about losing those pounds we gained over the holidays or during the pandemic. Research shows that a non-dieting approach known as “Mindful Eating” can help us achieve whatever our goal is around eating. Many studies show that changing the way we THINK about food – and our emotional attachment to it – can help us achieve our goals related to eating.
Recently you may have noticed that drinks labeled as “diet” are disappearing off the shelf and being replaced with descriptions such as “sugar-free”. It seems that the beverage industry is on to the “no diet” trend. Industry experts explain that consumers do not see themselves as “dieting”. Instead, their attitude reflects making choices that align with what they perceive as good for themselves.
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Mindful eating supports this thinking and shifts the focus from body weight to well-being. This approach encourages you to let go of the idea of forbidden or bad foods and promotes unconditional permission to eat when and what food is desired. Sound too good to be true? It does require that we learn new skills and make thoughtful behavior changes, such as learning or re-learning to recognize when we’re full and then pushing the pause button on eating.
Through mindful eating, we stop labeling food as “good” or “bad” and also increase our awareness of using food as a reward or comfort. A mindful eating practice helps us acknowledge how emotions impact our eating patterns, helping to identify when we’re eating because we’re tired, stressed, anxious, or even happy. And most powerful of all, our mindfulness practice helps us accept ourselves and avoid negative, self-defeating self-talk and take a more self-compassionate stance.
Mindful eating involves slowing down and utilizing our senses while eating, noticing how we feel physiologically and psychologically. We make a stronger mind-body connection when paying attention to the taste, texture, sound, smell, and sight of our food. Mindful eating is a learned behavior that builds self-acceptance and creates a new and sustainable relationship to eating. Through it, we pay closer attention to our body’s hunger signals (or lack thereof) and learn how to develop a personalized, flexible approach that works with individual differences and lifestyles, instead of strictly following external rules and guidelines.
Doing things out of habit or without conscious thought is the most significant barrier to behavior change. And that’s why mindfulness-based eating programs effectively change or maintain healthy eating habits. Their effectiveness is based on the fact that with practice, people learn how to integrate small changes that have a BIG impact. For example, with a mindfulness practice, you begin to realize when your attention is elsewhere and when you are mindlessly performing activities like eating. You also learn practical techniques to combat this, such as simply slowing down and enjoying your food by engaging your senses. The bottom line is that when you are present, you can pause before you react. Just a few seconds is all you need to consider the choice you are about to make.
The following exercise focuses on how you can identify situations or times that might be most challenging for you.