3 Tips to Start Mindful Eating and Stop Overeating
How can I start eating MINDFULLY?
What even IS Mindful Eating?
If you are asking this question, this post might help!
As women in menopause or even perimenopause, life is on overdrive. As part of the sandwich generation, we seem to be always busy, caring for parents, working and many of us still living with children at home!
Many women are also facing the loss of relationships, and being single.
With all of the above piled on their plate.
This is modern living, and with all this rushing, we can mindlessly eat, because we are over-hungry, or we need to feel less stressed.
I’ve done this, I can still do this, if I get overwhelmed!
When I first started the practice of Mindful Eating, these things happened:
I saw my eating patterns more clearly.
I become AWARE of thoughts, behaviours and patterns.
I SAW how these affected my eating. A lot of it was mindless.
I went unconscious to buffer what I was feeling in the moment.
And this was the struggle with food, that no DIET would ever address.
Learning mindful eating DID teach me that mindless eating is NORMAL, especially in our crazy, busy, menopause and perimenopause days.
We ARE distracted, multitasking to get stuff done and scrolling Instagram or Facebook to numb out. We may be doing this with chips. Or chocolate.
We may barely notice if we are hungry or full when we eat.
We may barely notice any emotions.
Many people melt food and feelings together, We say, "I feel like a bag of chips" when we are at the grocery store. No we don’t really feel like a bag of chips.
We feel stressed, angry, tired, over hungry or sad.
We want to eat a bag of chips because we ARE feeling something. We just haven’t acknowledged what it is.
One simple tip to start eating mindfully is to look at what you’re FEELING before you decide to eat, before you even decide WHAT to eat.
Here are the 3 ways you can start eating, Mindfully.
Take a moment to identify your feelings. This is where tuning in to what you are feeling (hungry, angry, sad, lonely, bored etc.) can help you make a choice: to eat or not to eat. You can learn more about that here, in this podcast episode.
Try and identify the EVENTS that led to the feelings in the first place.
Acknowledging the events of the day that triggered the feelings, and over eating, is another step to eating mindfully. Be kind and supportive to yourself as you do this. You are human, and you are allowed to feel whatever it is in this moment. It needs to be honoured. We can't deal with what we can't acknowledge.
Acknowledgement is also brave, and scary.
Ask yourself if you are truly hungry.
Is your tummy making noise?
Do you feel that gnaw of real hunger in your stomach.
Are you hungry for friendship at a social event and not the appetizers?
It takes some time to tune into your body’s feelings of true hunger. We can’t do this if we aren’t slowing down, and listening in to ourselves, even for a few minutes.
We also lose the ability to listen to our hunger if we have been dieting, and going off the diet, for many of our 50 plus years.
Only you can know what you need
in any given moment.
If you are having trouble identifying what you need, meet me in a 15 minute free chat, to see if Mindful Eating can help you with that.
Tanya