BY ELENI GEORGIOU – DIETITIAN, MANLY VILLAGE MEDICAL
Have you heard about mindful eating, and wonder what it involves? Learning how to practice mindful eating has a multitude of benefits. Mindful eating strategies help those who struggle with emotional eating, stress eating, boredom eating, and even binge eating. And I’m sure everyone can relate to at least one of those.
Eating mindfully means that we are using all of our senses to experience and enjoy the food choices we make. Attention is being paid to the foods that are chosen, the reasons why you’re choosing that food and the responses to that food.
4 Tips for Eating Mindfully
- Always eat on a plate where you can. Avoid eating out of packets as more often than not, we end up overeating. And before we know it, the packet is empty.
- Remove distractions. Enable yourself to use your senses to enjoy the meal. What does it taste like? What’s the texture like? Look at the colours. What combinations do you have on your plate? This will increase your satisfaction from the meal.
- Wait 10 minutes until looking for your second portion. One we’ve all heard before. This allows your stomach time to tell your brain that it’s actually full.
- Take smaller bites and slow down. We are all busy and before we know it, we are left with 10 minutes to scoff down our lunch, and we really need to take our time again to increase the satisfaction we feel from that meal.
This will help us eat less, eat better quality food, digest our food more effectively, and importantly, actually enjoy what’s in front of us.
