Mindful Eating

Mindful eating means being aware of the sensations you feel and the thoughts you have while eating. It means eating with the intention of caring for yourself, overriding troublesome feelings and urges.

Benefits of mindful eating:

• Teaches you to be less reactive to stress. • Helps you to manage emotions. • Increases your awareness of unrecognized or unexamined triggers, thoughts, feelings that lead to overeating. • Helps you create mental space between your triggers and your actions. • When you understand why and how you eat, as well as the situations that make you start and stop eating, you are much more likely to be successful.

How to practice mindful eating:

• Be more aware of sensations (hear, touch, taste, smell, and see). • Be aware of you physical and emotional cues and your non-hunger triggers for eating. • Make your food look good and it will taste that way. • Notice whether you are mindlessly munching or tasting each bite. (Rushed eating often leads to dissatisfaction with meals and cravings. Sit down and eat slowly!) • Be aware of what your mind is doing (obsessing, worrying, craving). Take a moment before you eat to quantify your hunger. • Pay attention to how your hunger and fullness change with each bite (pay attention to how it changes your hunger and fullness.)

Food journal

When filling out your food journals, be sure to rate how your stomach feels before, during and after each meal or snack.

Please use the number scale below.

Hunger/satiety scale

1 Extreme hunger, dizziness, headache 2 Very hungry, irritable 3 Strong signals to eat 4 First signals that it is time to eat 5 Perfectly comfortable 6 Slightly overeating 7 Starting to feel uncomfortable 8 Very full 9 So full you are starting to hurt 10 Absolutely stuffed