What is Mindful Eating and is it Better Than Dieting?
Mindful Eating is similar to Intuitive Eating.
Mindful Eating fits in the broader concept of Intuitive Eating, but has different roots. It is an excellent tool for menopausal women looking to help their health, and food relationship.
What is Mindful Eating?
You may be asking, “What is Mindful Eating?” because you want to lose weight in menopause, you are sick of a weight obsessed world, you’re looking for an alternative to intuitive eating, or you just want to have a more balanced food relationship.
Mindful eating is the practice of being aware, in the exact moment you are in, of your food experience. It might also be part conscious eating, flexible nutrition and can be an amazing practice to feel more at ease in your changing midlife bdoy and to find peace along with that confusing space of food freedom.
Mindful Eating is helpful in perimenopause, and menopause when you may be struggling with body changes.
You’re also probably struggling with conflicting nutrition advice around perimenopause and menopause, and crave permission just to relax and enjoy your food and life!
You may have heard a lot about Mindfulness, and Intuitive Eating, but what have you heard about Mindful Eating on your journey to answer the question, “What IS Mindful Eating?”
Mindful Eating is a way of approaching food that focuses on your own senses, and awareness, of the food experience, in the moment. Our body needs change from moment to moment, meal to meal, and season to season.
When you eat mindfully, you are bringing your full attention to your food, no matter what it is. That FULL attention helps you decipher your own hunger, fullness, your like or dislike of a food you thought was delicious, and to let go of guilt around food choices.
You can be eating a carrot, or a piece of carrot cake.
Instead of asking “What is Mindful Eating?” perhaps ask “How can Mindful Eating Help Me?”
There are many advantages of the practice of Mindful Eating, no matter how you eat right now!
Embracing the practice of Mindful Eating helps you to feel your own body signals. In my Mini Course to Increase Your Energy in Midlife, I share how certsin body cues, like thirst, change as we age.
We don’t get the same signals we did before menopause.
Mindful Eating will help you in a way that a diet cannot.
You learn to understand your own unique body cues of hunger and fullness. We all feel hunger and fullness differently. Mindful Eating helps you understand and feel the signals YOUR body has always been giving you. We lose those signals when we ignore our body’s physical hunger.
Ignoring these hungers, through dieting, has lead to some of us not feeling or understanding or own hunger anymore.
Mindful Eating is more than just understanding hunger.
It will help you recognize:
Your own fullness cues.
What satisfaction with food feels like.
Emotional cravings.
Your own food and health needs.
Mindful Eating helps you STOP judging yourself about your food choices!
When you practice Mindful Eating, you bring awareness to your thoughts about your food. You will see how much you JUDGE yourself about your food choices.
You will also see how much you judge your BODY.
This awareness creates emotions that may keep you stuck in negative thoughts about your body. Change rarely comes from criticism. Yet, our inner critic becomes louder in menopause.
Mindful Eating teaches Self Compassion. It involves paying KIND attention to your self, and your choices around food.
What diet does THAT?
Think about the last diet you went on, and then off. Did you feel kind to yourself? We embark on fat loss as a way of self care, because we are taught that is is health. Underneath it all, there is also a sense of shame at weight gain.
We are also under a false impression that our bodies are under our control.
They are not.
Mindful Eating and Self Compassion.
If you were to Google the term self compassion, you will come across Dr. Kristen Neff. She has stated three components of self compassion.
Self-kindness: comfort yourself when suffering.
Common humanity: understanding this is part of being human.
Mindfulness of suffering: awareness and openness to your pain.
In a world where so much shame exists around body size and food choices, learning self compassion can be one of the best tools in finding food and body freedom.
The shame you feel around body size as you age can amplify.
You long for “the body you once had.” This can drive you deeper into dieting behaviour at a time of life where you need critical nutrients.
I believe Mindful Eating is the perfect tool for the midlife woman, whose body is changing, in a world where bodies are expected to stay the same. This is a hard struggle in menopause!
Mindful Eating is helpful in decreasing your struggle.
Mindfulness itself is about decreasing the struggle.
We are taught to look OUTSIDE of ourselves for the answers to what to eat, when to eat, and … how we should look.
Diets teach us that, don’t they?
There are other teachers out there. Our friends, mothers, social media, magazines fashion and celebrities. Mindful Eating can teach us to look inside of ourselves, in a way that diets don’t. We call this our Inner Wisdom.
Only YOU know when you are hungry, full, satisfied, or find your food choice to be delicious. A diet doesn’t. It tells you when to eat, how much, and even WHAT to eat.
Mindful eating can set you on a path to permanent and sustainable health changes that incorporates nourishing choices, and a little flexibility!
Mindful Eating incorporates joy, curiousity, presence, flexibility, awareness, discovery, which in turn can give you back some FREEDOM and FUN around the food you eat.
If you would like to know if you’re ready for a non diet approach to health, including mindful eating, contact me here to see if this is right for you, at this time.
And if you are trying to eat mindfully?
Know that this is a practice.
It takes time.
It isn’t about eating *perfectly* mindful, at every meal.
Let me know in the comments, or come find me on Instagram and let me know if you are new to mindful eating, and what you think of it.
WIshing you well on your food journey!
References:
Kristeller Jean L., Jordan Kevin D. Mindful Eating: Connecting With the Wise Self, the Spiritual Self Frontiers in Psychology, vol 9, 2018
DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01271
Bays, Jan Chosen, Mindful Eating, A Guide to Discovering a Healthy and Joyful Relationship to Food Shambala Publications 2009.