There’s a lot of talk around ways you can adapt your approach towards eating to help you lose weight. These techniques focus more on how and when you eat your food, rather than what you eat. But is this a principle that could work for you?
We’re not talking about the diets that limit the time frame you can eat within, but instead focusing on a concept known as ‘Mindful Eating’. In our blog we’re going to give you an insight into how this method works and the tools to decide whether it could help you on your weight loss journey.
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful Eating is a concept based on the Buddhist practise of mindfulness, a thought process in which you slow down your thoughts and think more about what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and how you feel about it.
Mindful Eating is recognised for helping people lose weight without dramatically changing what they’re eating as it puts your mind at the forefront of your diet, making you focus on how your body feels, what it needs and whether you’re actually hungry.
The Fundamentals of Mindful Eating
There are many elements to mindful eating, including a range of thought processes you need to learn to have in relation to food and eating. These include:
- Eating Slower: You need to chew slower, savour the taste of your food and actually acknowledge and appreciate your food as your eating it. Eating slower can also help with weight loss as there’s a delay in the food reaching your stomach and your mind recognising that, hence if you eat quickly, you won’t feel full when you’re done.
- Eating Without Distraction: We often eat aimlessly and without focus, hence we eat too much as we’ve not even realised we’re full. So, turn the TV off and put your phone down when you’re eating and concentrate on what you’re putting in your body and how that is making you feel.
- Listening to Physical Hunger Signs: Although an eating routine is good for maintaining a balanced diet, we can get stuck in a rut and end up eating because of the time and not because we’re hungry. Mindful Eating encourages you to acknowledge physical signs of hunger within our body opposed to just watching the clock to decide when to eat.
- Thinking About Why You’re Eating: As well as waiting for physical signs of hunger before eating, Mindful Eating also gets you to think about why you’re eating before you do. Are you actually hungry, or are you just bored? Are you eating because of the time of day or because you need to? By having this thought process, you can stop yourself eating for no reason.
- Acknowledging How Food Makes Your Body Feel: We often eat and then move on with our day, not really giving a second thought to how our bodies feel after food. But, if we took a little time to acknowledge how our bodies feel in the time after eating, it could help us to educate ourselves more on what food our bodies appreciate and what they don’t.
Why Should You Try Mindful Eating?
When trying to lose weight, a lot of the focus is put on the food we’re eating and not the actual process of being hungry which can make people obsessed with what they’re eating and not actually how, when and why they’re eating it.
Mindful Eating shifts the attention away from the actual food and moves the focus on to your body, allowing you to become more engaged and in tune with it, which is something that has helped people not just lose weight but combat eating disorders and bad relationships with food too.
Instead of scrutinising what you’re putting in your body before you’ve even eaten it, you can learn to listen to your body and make natural yet educated choices to satisfy it. You begin to know when your body is actually hungry and what foods it needs and wants the most to work at its best. So, you can automatically get into a better routine with eating that is led by listening to your body, as opposed to your mind.
Mindful Eating can be incorporated into any diet or weight loss treatments you’re trying to aid your weight loss and create a better relationship with your body and food. Medical weight loss products such as the ones we prescribe here at Bodyline Clinic suppress your appetite and cut cravings, but it is easy after years of bad eating habits to ignore the fact that you’re not hungry and eat anyway.
Combining Mindful Eating with our medical weight loss plans will only enhance your experience and improve your chances of succeeding with your weight loss as it changes your mindset towards eating and gives you the right focus to only eat what your body wants and needs.
Have you tried Mindful Eating? Let us know how you found it!
