mindful eating for weight loss

Mindful Eating – Stop Binge Eating ThroughEating Mindfully

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The Basics of Mindless Eating

Mindful eating. You may have heard the term online on weight loss blogs or from chatting with your friends, but before we talk about all the wonderful effects of mindful eating we should take a quick look at what mindful eating is.

At its core, mindful eating consists of three basic concepts: Making the active choice to consume healthy foods that nourish your body, recognizing hunger cues that tell you when you’re really hungry and when you’re really full, and finally taking the time to slowly eat and enjoy your food.

Sounds simple enough, right? This is where you might expect to hear a “Wrong and thisis why!” but mindful eating really is as simple as that. The difficult part comes from unlearning all the bad habits you’ve lived with all your life in order to create a more healthy relationship with the food you eat.




The Benefits of Mindful Eating

Mindful eating is a fantastic lifestyle change that carries a lot of great benefits with it. Look at the very basest or benefits it helps you to lose weight by encouraging good eating habits and healthy food choices. Rather than a restrictive diet mindful eating gives you a lot of wiggle room with what you can have.

Want that slice of pizza or that chocolate chip cookie? Have it! You haven’t failed mindful eating by “cheating” because mindful eating is more about your overall relationship with food than picking “good” food items from a list and avoiding the bad ones.

Another benefit of mindful eating is that by only eating when you’re hungry and stoppingwhen you’re satisfied, you’ll find that you eat less. Leaving the dinner table holding your belly and thinking “man I ate way too much” is one of the many bad habits mindful eating can break, leaving you more satisfied with what you do eat and keeping you fromfeeling like you’ve packed too much into a space not built to hold it all.

One of the best benefits of mindful eating comes with persistence. The “mindless” snacking that comes with eating in front of the TV or while working will come to an end. When you make healthy choices and follow your hunger cues you won’t feel like you need to eat just to fill the space or time when you’re not doing anything else.

This alone can help you lose weight if that’s your goal because the average person takes in a ton of extra unhealthy calories from chips, soda, and other “mindless” snacks they don’t think twice about absentmindedly consuming.

Natural Hunger vs Emotional Eating

One of the important things that you need to understand about eating is that it’s tied to the hunger cues that your body sends out when it’s telling you that it needs food. There are generally three types of hunger that you feel and those are natural hunger, thirst hunger, and emotional hunger.

Natural hunger is the most basic kind of hunger, you feel it when you get up and throughout the day as your body needs food and nourishment. Thirst hunger is a little more tricky because it feels like but the mechanism for thirst is weaker than that of hunger it’s easy to get confused. The next time you’re feeling a little hungry try a glass of water instead, you’ll be surprised how often you’re just thirsty instead.

The last kind of hunger is known as emotional hunger. This is also known as stress hunger because it comes on as a response to an emotional stressor. Have you ever felt upset and gone to the fridge for some comfort food? That’s emotional hunger taking control right there and it can create a dangerous and damaging relationship with your food and eating habits.




One of the keys to successful mindful eating habits is identifying which kind of hunger you’re experiencing and reacting appropriately. Natural hunger comes on slowly and you can, after a while, gauge when you’ll likely be feeling it based on when you last ate.

It’s also the kind of hunger that will go away when you’re satisfied and you’ve eaten enough to satisfy your hunger. Emotional hunger on the other hand comes on quickly and drives you to grab whatever’s at hand regardless of whether it’s a good food choice or not. It will also stay even if you’re past satisfied because your hunger is a reaction to the emotion, not an actual need.

The key to dealing with emotional hunger is recognizing it before it becomes a problem and removing the source of the emotional stress. This will have the overall effect of removing the unnatural hunger and help to maintain your healthy relationship that you’ve been building with your eating.

However emotional hunger is powerful and you can’t always just wave away your problems with the snap of your fingers. You don’t have to feel like you’ve failed becauseyou caved into emotional hunger, but you do need to recognize when it happens, what caused it, and take steps to prevent yourself from falling prey to it again in the future.

Preventing Mindless Snacking

Mindless snacking is tied to emotional hunger, but in a different way than stress eating is. Most often mindless snacking or “grazing” comes about as a lack of something to do rather than any outside source. If you’re stuck in front of your computer at home or at work or sitting down in front of the television it’s really easy to just reach for some chips or popcorn and use that as a way to occupy yourself on the side.

You’re basically eating because you’re bored and have nothing else to do, which can bemassively detrimental to maintaining a healthy relationship with food.

Mindful eating helps to break us out of that cycle by making us aware of the hunger we feel naturally and taking care of that hunger. When we are mindful of our hunger cues and watching what and when we eat we become more aware of when we’re reaching for a snack that we shouldn’t really be having.

You will start to recognize when you’re putting your arm over into that bag of chips or box of crackers and stop yourself before you start grazing rather than after you feel unnaturally full when you fill your stomach full of junk without realizing it.

Making Good Eating Decisions

When I say good eating decisions, I’m not just talking about choosing a plate of veggies over that slice of pizza. When you eat and how often is just as important if not more so than what you’re eating.




Mindful eating is all about listening to your natural cues for when you’re hungry, which won’t always crop up right when you get up for breakfast, at noon for lunch, and around 5 PM for dinner.

When your body needs food will vary based on what and when you ate last and your overall health and eating when you’re feeling that natural hunger is important. So is stopping when you’re full.

Not just full as in “Man I can’t eat another bite I’m stuffed!” because that bloated feeling from overeating is your body telling you that you’ve eaten too much. When eating mindfully you should aim to stop eating when you’re simply no longer hungry rather thanan actual “full” feeling.

Another thing to remember is that you shouldn’t feel ashamed to leave food on your plate if you’re already satisfied. You may have been brought up to finish everything on your plate, but the tradition behind that mentality came from a time when food was scarce and eating everything you had was a necessary way of life.

The end result of properly following your hunger cues is that you no longer feel like you need to binge eat because you’re “starving”. If you wait until you’re getting serious hunger pangs to eat then not only have you waited way too long but you’re also far more likely to overeat. Binge eating to make up for being hungry is incredibly common with people who eat on a set schedule.

You’re not only more likely to eat more because you feel like you have to make up for when you didn’t eat but you’ll probably also go for easier, faster choices like fast food or prepackaged meals rather than something healthy and delicious that you can savor andenjoy.

So how do you make sure to avoid this binge eating from feeling hungry? Well a good idea is to keep something small that you can snack on with you at all times. Good candidates for this are small, healthy packaged foods like string cheese, or jerky and fresh foods like fruits.

If you have something you can use to respond to hunger cues even when you don’t have the time to eat a full meal you’re less likely to binge later because you’re too hungry to care.




Avoiding “Stuffing” Yourself

I’m sure all of you out there at least once have come away from a big holiday meal or a family dinner with unbuttoned pants, feeling bloated and wishing that you hadn’t had that last helping of mashed potatoes.

We’ve all been there before but that doesn’t mean that you have to go back again. Mindful eating techniques can help you to not only enjoy your food but help you feel full and satisfied without feeling like you need to have your pants taken up a size.

The easiest and most basic strategy is to take the time to slowly chew and savor each bite of food as you eat it. Leave it in your mouth, appreciate the flavors of the meal. You can even go so far as to put your fork down in between bites as you feel the weight of each bite you take hit your stomach.

You’ll be able to really enjoy and appreciate the flavors of some of your favorite foods and by eating mindfully all the while you’re giving your body time to respond to the food it’s ingesting. When your body has time to take stock of everything you’re eating then it has time to let you know when it’s full.




Feeling stuffed usually comes from eating bite after bite way too fast and before you know it you’ve got more than your stomach can comfortably hold. Taking your time to enjoy each bite of your meal does the double duty of letting you enjoy the delicious flavors and also keeping you from overeating as well.

Mindful Eating and Binging: Creating a Healthy Relationship with Food

You’ve probably read over and over about maintaining and creating a healthy relationship with food through mindful eating, but what does that really mean for you? Well think about your life, even as far back as your childhood. As a kid you’re told to eat everything on your plate whether you like it or not.

Growing up as a teenager your body and hormones make you feel hungry all the time so by the time you get into your twenties and your metabolism starts to slow down you’ve formed bad eating habits like downing fast food all the time that you’re going to have to live with for the rest of your life. That is unless you can find a way to break them.

Mindful eating isn’t just about making good choices with what you eat and when or how you eat it, it’s also about unlearning the bad habits that (unless of course your parents were nutritionists or dietitians) you’ve likely picked up throughout your life.

Let’s face it, it’s the mentality of the average person today to get your food, eat it quick, and get back to whatever you were doing as fast as possible. That’s not just unhealthy, it’s downright dangerous. However, these habits aren’t impossible to break.

The practice of mindful eating, at its core, is about slowly savoring food and putting more emphasis on how and when you eat than the specific content of your diet, though you should always aim to choose nutritious and healthy foods in the long run.

When you practice eating mindfully you’re learning good eating habits that will, hopefully, become part of your lifestyle forever. When you learn to eat mindfully is when you can recognize bad eating habits when they rear their ugly heads and squash them then and there.

Mindful eating is the bane of binge eating and mindless snacking. It teaches us to be aware of our hunger and our body’s needs and urges us to make good food choices whenever possible.

When you actively make the effort to make good eating choices for yourself then you’ll notice that you no longer look forward to stopping at the drive through on your way home in favor of something you can really enjoy for yourself when you get home because you’re not so hungry that you have to eat something right then and there.

That’s not to say you can’t choose to eat something from fast food, but you shouldn’t feel like it has to be an option because you don’t have any other choice.




Conclusion

The most important thing that you can do to help yourself stay fit and lose weight or maintain your health is to learn how to build a good, lifelong healthy relationship with your food while pulling yourself away from the bad habits that you may have picked up along the way.

By following the tenets of watching for your hunger cues, making active choices to eat healthy and nutritious foods, and taking the time to savor and enjoy your meals without stuffing yourself you’ll be able to take the first steps towards repairing your relationship with food without having to worry about the pitfalls of grazing and binge eating that kill traditional diets.




mindful eating for weight loss

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