Mindful Eating is NOT a diet

In today’s modern world it is very rare that we sit down and focus on our eating, it has become a mindless task. Have you ever found yourself sitting down to eat and before you have even realised it, you have pulled out your phone or turned on the TV? You end up going into autopilot with your food and not even noticing what you are putting into your mouth while scrolling through your Facebook feed or getting lost in a TV show.

With mindless eating, you rarely register the amount you have taken in. In doing this you lose some of the body’s normal processes that tell us, we are full. Things like actively taking note of the how many spoonful’s you’ve had; by watching it go into your mouth, the process of swallowing, and believe it or not, even smelling the food, send chemical signals to the brain that eating is taking place, and to turn off the feelings of ‘hunger’. If you lose this because of concentration on other tasks, the brain can take up to 20 minutes to realise that you have actually eaten while it waits for the food to hit your gut. In this time, without realising it, overeating can easily occur.

Mindful eating looks at applying mindfulness to focus our full attention on the act of eating, including the experience, your cravings and any physical cues of hunger and fullness. Over time, you will find you are more naturally able to check in with these physical cues and allow hunger and sustenance drive eating.