Do you wonder whether making more conscious choices will help you lose weight and keep it off? Yes? Then consider how to be present in the moment to make better food choices with conscious actions.
Joy is a doctor and a widow with no children. She works all day, and, on her way home, she stops by a fast-food restaurant and picks up a burger and fries for dinner. She eats as fast as she can because she wants to get dinner over with and go home.
When Joy called me for help, the most pressing thing for her was that she is tired of gaining weight. We do an assessment and noticed that Joy had few pleasures in life. We create a plan. Then she took pleasure in eating again. She created a special dinner for herself at home. She put on music that she loves and cooked food that she enjoys. She sat down, relaxed and ate slowly, noticing the aromas, textures, flavors. This was Joy experiencing and enjoying mindful eating.
Conscious Choices
When making lifestyle changes, we purposefully disrupt specific old routines that are no longer helpful. Then we can replace old patterns with new habits by making conscious choices. Healing starts with awareness. We can become aware of what we feel, truly want, and then make a conscious choice for ourselves. But how? We can free ourselves and make these conscious choices and:
- Discover the Myth of Multi-tasking.
- Slow down when we eat: experience the tastes and textures. Eat more mindfully instead of eating quickly to get it over with.
Multi-Tasking
Do you often get distracted while eating and find that you’re not present in the moment? Maybe you eat while watching TV or while on another device. The problem is that distractions like these may lead to overeating.
As Sharon Salzberg shared in her article, The Myth of Multi-Tasking, our, “brain can focus only on one thing at a time.” Salzberg noted that what happens when we attempt to multi-task, is that we shift our attention between tasks and take in information sequentially. This means that we can’t really concentrate on two or more things at once. According to Salzberg, this shift back and forth wastes time and lowers the quality of what we do. I believe that multi-tasking can make us largely unconscious of our eating experience.
How to Enjoy Mindful Eating
How can you enjoy the moment you are in and focus on how to enjoy mindful eating?
There’s a biological reason for you to slow down and enjoy eating mindfully. Our human brain takes 15 minutes to register the food we’ve eaten and then signal that we are getting full or are full. When we eat quickly, our brain often doesn’t have enough time to tell us we’re almost full. Then we tend to overeat. Distracted eating can cause us to feel unsatisfied, overeat, and gain weight.
Enjoying eating mindfully and slowing down when we eat is a powerful way to switch from a stress response to a much needed relaxation response.
Click here for more ways to eat mindfully.
- Click here to watch the Latest Sweet Life Wellness Podcast Episode on How to Enjoy Mindful Eating.
- Click here to listen for FREE on Apple Podcasts.
- Want to listen for FREE on Spotify? Click here.
Kay Loughrey, MPH, RDN, LDN
Transformational Speaker, Breakthrough Coach, Nutritionist-Dietitian
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