Health and Wellness

6 Guidelines of Mindful Eating:

1. Savor your food slowly.

• Allow yourself to connect with your body and fully appreciate the flavors and textures as they journey from your mouth to your stomach, releasing essential nutrients into your cells. By doing this, your body will signal when you're satisfied, helping you recognize when you've had enough.

2. Focuses on portion control.

• While it can be challenging, practicing mindful eating helps us understand our cues for when we're about 80% full, assisting us in determining the appropriate amount of food to put on our plates. Starting with smaller portions or using smaller plates encourages mindfulness and gratitude for what we're eating. Eating slowly allows your stomach and mind to communicate fullness effectively.

3. Involves understanding the energy balance in our bodies:

• Food is the source of energy our bodies need for everyday activities like walking, breathing, and moving. This energy intake should ideally balance the energy output. When we consume calorie-dense foods that lack proper nutrition or satisfaction and become less active (leading to a sedentary lifestyle), the scale tips toward weight gain.

4. Mindful substitutions:

• It encourages awareness of the inner dialogues that influence our food choices. We all experience cravings, and it's okay to indulge occasionally in that sweet treat or fried food. Mindful substitution involves identifying healthier alternatives to these treats that can be just as enjoyable, reducing the need for unhealthy options.

5. Keeping temptation out of sight:

• Having trigger foods always visible makes it more likely that you'll want them and overindulge. Moving these tempting treats out of sight, such as placing them on the top shelf in the garage or your co-worker's desk at work, reduces their allure because they aren't constantly in your line of sight. The more resistant you become to certain foods like cookies or chips, the more you'll think about them and crave them. In these instances, you should use mindfulness techniques like meditation, body scans, or loving-kindness practices to take back control and replace negative thoughts with positive reinforcement.

6. Having loving-kindness and silencing your inner critic:

• This guideline addresses our imbalanced relationship with eating. Negative feelings about food, anger toward others for their appearance, body dissatisfaction, and restrictions on food intake all stem from the inner critic. The inner critic consists of three main components: the inner perfectionist, inner pusher, and inner critic. The inner perfectionist drives us to pursue perfection at any cost. The inner pusher tells us how to reach that unattainable level of perfection, creating an ever-growing list of requirements. The inner critic constantly judges and criticizes our choices, leaving us feeling guilty. To silence these inner critics, we can practice meditation and cultivate full awareness in the present moment. This diminishes the power of the inner critic over time, ultimately leading to its disappearance. While it requires time and practice, incorporating meditation into your daily routine will strengthen your mindfulness and weaken the inner critic's influence until it vanishes.