What is Mindful Eating?

By Stepy Kamei

If you've ever wanted helpful advice on how to improve your eating habits, you should really know more about the concept of mindful eating. You may have heard about mindfulness meditation before, which is certainly a good place to start. Essentially, mindful eating takes the same concepts in relation to your dietary methods. Furthermore, mindful eating is a method that's been shown to have a wide range of benefits to a person's health and well-being. Keep on reading to learn more about why you should try out the process of mindful eating, and how to do so.

All About Mindfulness

As previously mentioned, mindfulness is based on a meditation technique dating back to ancient Buddhism. When it comes to mindfulness meditation, the process encourages a person to be acutely aware of their thoughts and surroundings without passing any judgmental thoughts on anything they are thinking, feeling, or experiencing. This is meant to help a person refrain from getting caught up in negative thought patterns, which so often lead to negative actions on the outside. People struggling with a wide variety of health conditions such as depression, anxiety, chronic pain, and eating disorders have all benefited from using mindfulness meditation.

Applying Mindfulness to Your Eating Habits

So, how can the practice of mindfulness relate to your eating habits? It turns out that eating mindfully can help reduce your chances of overeating, not to mention eating unhealthy meals and snacks as well.

Unfortunately, modern society has collectively developed a few bad habits when it comes to eating. First, we often tend to eat out of boredom and we don't really think about what we are eating or why. Mindful eating helps to fix this. Another common problem is that we often eat too fast, so we end up eating more food than our bodies actually need in order to feel full.

Fortunately, it's easy to implement eating mindfully into your daily routine. It simply involves changing your thoughts around the foods you consume. Practice mindfulness between meals to sense when you're actually feeling hungry, as opposed to just feeling bored or emotional. Use mindfulness while eating by really noticing how the food tastes and feels in your mouth. Chew thoughtfully, and take your time, so you don't overindulge. Also, be sure to take the time to truly appreciate your food.

By making this subtle yet important change in your diet, you may soon begin to experience benefits including weight loss, increased energy, and positive emotions.

To learn more about your health, wellness and fitness, see your local chiropractor at The Joint Chiropractic in Roswell, Ga.