Eating Mindfully

Posted on Oct 5, 2011 | 1 comment

We’ve all experienced this: your fingers scrape the bottom of the bag of chips/cookies/pick-your-poison and you suddenly realize that you may have reached into the bag for handful-after-handful and yet you haven’t really “registered” or gotten satisfaction from many of the bites. Maybe you’re watching TV, on the computer, driving in the car, or lost in your own thoughts and/or feelings. Maybe what drove you to snack in the first place was not actual physical hunger, but stress, anger or boredom. Unfortunately, when we’re not “mindful” of the bites we are eating, either because we are not paying attention or because we’re eating for “head hunger,” not for a physical need, extra bites become extra calories, become extra pounds.

Clearly, a lot of our eating ends up being “out of whack” with our actual physical hunger or need for nutrition. We also don’t always fully appreciate and savor the bites we take so that it ends up taking more and more – and more – bites to achieve some level of satisfaction. In this blog post, let’s take a look at some “mindful” and “intuitive” eating principles which can help better align our food intake with our physiological needs – and enhance our satisfaction with what we’ve eaten so that we don’t need to take quite so many bites!

Honor your hunger:

Keeping your body fed when you are physiologically hungry may mean you have to start actively listening for – and gauging – your hunger. If you were to start using a hunger scale when you are thinking about eating, where would you say your “state of hunger” typically falls along a continuum of “completely empty” to “so over-full that you feel physically ill?” Take some time to note your own patterns – and how often you are eating for reasons not at all related to physiological hunger. Sometimes we eat beyond fullness just because each bite tastes so darn good (“taste hunger”), or we find ourselves eating to soothe feelings or in response to our emotions, boredom or habit (“head hunger” ). So start listening to and rating your hunger – it’s hard to hear something when we’re not paying attention.

Feel your fullness:

Be mindful of physiological signals that tell you that you are no longer hungry. How often are you really stopping your eating based on completely non-hunger related cues? Probably more often than you even realize. You may have been a lifelong member of the “clean-your-plate-club,” or you can’t stand to see anything go to waste because you paid good money for it! There has been a lot of research which has shown that, as adults, the amount of food we eat is strongly influenced by the size of the container, or how many options are available. For example, if offered a bowl with two M&M colors and one with several M&M colors, guess which bowl empties more quickly? Learning to “feel your fullness” can start by abandoning the idea of “eating to completion.” Instead, pause in the middle of eating for a satiety and a taste check. Are you hungry enough to continue? Do you feel satisfied? Is the food enjoyable enough to merit any more bites or are you just eating because the food is there? When you discover your fullness level, you can also identify your “last bite threshold,” when you know that bite of food in your mouth should be your last one. At that point, do something to make it a conscious act, such as nudging your plate forward or putting your utensils or napkin on your plate.

Discover the satisfaction factor:

How often do we overlook the true pleasure and satisfaction that can be found in the eating experience? It helps to become a “mindful eater.” Ask yourself, “What do I really want to eat?” Maybe that tub of off-brand ice cream that was on sale looks promising, but would a scoop of your favorite premium brand be more satisfying? Once you’ve determined what you really want to eat, be sure then to eat without distraction, in a pleasant environment; eat when you are gently hungry, rather than overly hungry. Don’t settle – if you don’t love it, don’t eat it – and if you love it, be absolutely sure to savor it! When we pay attention to our food, we take much more satisfaction in it and we become more aware of how much we’re putting into our bodies.

Making the transition from our typical eating patterns to becoming a mindful or intuitive eater is a process that takes awareness, practice, practice and more practice. We have so many cues to eat (from advertising or even just driving down a thoroughfare full of fast food outlets) and so many distractions from the actual “task at hand” while we are eating that maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising that so many of us over-consume calories on a regular basis. In approaching your food intake in a mindful way, you can take back control of what you eat, when you eat and how much you eat.

This blog post is contributed by Karen Handy, MPH, a behavioral health educator and manager of nutrition and diabetes education at Palo Alto Medical Foundation. She supports patients making health behavior and lifestyle changes, co-facilitates PAMF’s bariatric support group and writes a blog on weight management and health behavior change for Sutter Health’s MyLifeStages website.