Eating while browsing your mobile, watching TV or working has now become commonplace. This leads to overeating, unintentional eating to suppress feelings of anxiety or sadness, and digestive problems. The way to avoid them is to be vigilant during meals.
Mindful eating is one such scientific approach, which creates awareness about eating habits. This not only helps recognize the right hunger cues, but also helps avoid emotional eating.
Mindful eating means that every time you eat, you should focus entirely on the food. You recognize the signals of hunger and satisfaction. It gives importance to the connection with food.
Thirst can also cause feelings of hunger, but it is not hunger.
When you’re actually hungry, you may notice signs like a rumbling stomach, lack of energy, or mild dizziness. We often confuse lack of water in the body with hunger.
In such a situation, drink a glass of water half an hour before meals. This makes it easy to guess actual hunger, but when you eat when you’re stressed, bored, or sad, you’re eating emotionally. During this period, you often want to eat fried foods or sweets more. In such a situation, while eating, ask yourself once if you are really hungry or if you want to eat because of thirst or some emotion.
Practice mindful eating like this
Try to have a set place and time to eat. Sit correctly. During this time, stay away from the television and telephone. Don’t do any other work either. This will help you focus entirely on the food.
Don’t rush during meals. Chew each bite 20 to 25 times. This gives better signals of satisfaction to the brain.
If you want, you can rate your hunger on a scale of 1 to 10. For example, give 1 point for extreme hunger and 10 points for a completely full stomach. Eat food when you are at level 3 or 4 and stop eating when you reach level 7 or 8. Apart from that, pay attention to its color, texture and aroma while eating. This increases the pleasure of eating.
Digestive problems will decrease, health will improve.
Mindful eating will gradually improve digestion. Will be able to control the amount of food. This will prevent overeating. The cycle of emotional eating will be broken. This will prevent uncontrolled eating and the guilt associated with it.
Renu Rakheja is a well-known nutritionist and health coach.
@consciouslivingtips