Mindful Eating: What is it and how can this be a part of everyday living?

With everything being fast-paced, there are ample food choices now to attract and confuse people. The digitized world of laptops, tablets, smartphones and smart TVs offering multiple distractions doesn’t help either in the act of enjoying what we eat.The busy-ness in today’s world makes people think of eating as nothing but another task, just waiting to be ticked off everyday’s routine. The result? Quicker, mindless act of eating leads to more binge eating and extra calories. Studies suggest that it may take 20 minutes for our brains to register and process that we’re full but when we eat too quickly, before those 20 minutes have passed, we tend to eat a lot more than the food that our body needs. The report further states that 60% of children with rapid eating habits overate and those who overate more than twice per week were thrice more likely to be overweight. Many more such reports from studies held in different countries have claimed that obesity and overweight issues stem from rapid eating. As opposed to rapid eating, when you eat mindfully, you are truly present and attentive as the act of eating becomes something intentional and worth savouring.Eating has now become second nature to us as we munch cookies, have the third cup of coffee or have last night’s pizza for breakfast even without noticing if we’ve eaten over and above what our body needs. Sometimes it is just satiating our cravings more than catering to those hunger pangs. Eating is one act that is not supposed to happen on auto-pilot or while letting our minds wander with a thousand distractions, whether it be checking the notifications on our phones, scrolling through the news feed, checking the email or losing ourselves in the show we are watching. How can mindful eating help?Mindful eating helps us slow down and relish each morsel as our senses devour the taste, and we focus on the look, and feel of the fresh carrots, ripe oranges, the green in the lettuce or as the sounds and aroma hits us when we open that meal box we’re indulging in. It also evolves our relationship with food as we are better able to understand how we feel about the food we’re having, keep a check on our everyday nutritional habits - whether we are eating a snack for lunch because we’re too busy for a meal or if we’re stress-eating. We start having a more positive attitude towards food that helps us curiously explore what we eat rather than feeling shame or guilt for having a certain food.Mindful eating helps us discover how certain foods make us feel, such as if they help us stay more alert and focussed or hypes us up with a lot of anxious energy.When we eat mindfully, we open ourselves up to healthier eating habits and just being more intuitive about what our body needs and how it responds to different foods. This in turn improves our mental health and food then truly becomes a medicine for our overall health and well-being.We become more empowered as we consciously listen to our body, become watchful of what we’re consuming and begin to understand which particular ingredients in our meals are benefitting us and which aren’t. This then helps us choose more nutritious foods that boost our health and happiness which further makes us feel grateful for the food on the table.This doesn’t however mean that mindful eating requires more time, though it does mean taking a pause to engage our senses and really pay attention to the texture, the aroma, the flavours and the overall feeling of eating. When we engage with the different sensory aspects of the food, we feel happy and satisfied with small portions of food.it also helps us differentiate better between cravings when we are feeling stressed and the stomach growling in hunger, helping us make healthier food choices as we develop a keen sense of how certain foods are impacting our bodies negatively or how overeating is making us lose track of how much we ate versus how much we need to eat.Since mindful eating encourages chewing foods slowly and thoroughly, it improves digestion and helps us steer clear of any digestion issues. This can further help with disorderly eating patterns such as binge eating or emotional eating as we become more aware of the food-related triggers and choose our response to them. With more self-control, awareness and positive emotions related to food, you feel freer to pick your response to impulses and triggers.Studies claim that mindful eating helps you lose weight also by reducing food-related stress as your eating behaviours get changed. What it also helps you control is wanting to eat because of the environment around or the sight of food (external eating).If we choose to make mindful eating our new best friend and start relying on what our body is telling us, we will start getting satisfied with even small amounts of the food that we have been craving to have and understand how the mind makes the food more enticing than it really is.What more?We can really indulge in the invigorating and holistic experience of enjoying the aroma, taste and feel of that pasta, cookie or salad and not mindlessly stock ourselves with boxes of candies, cookies or anything else that we can find in the fridge or in the kitchen cabinets. After all, isn’t the act of eating is all about appreciating every spoonful, every morsel and ingredient that goes in the making of a scrumptious meal? Let’s get reconnected with the pleasure of eating once again!