Try Mindful Eating Instead
By Michelle May, M.D.
This holiday season, experience optimal pleasure from all of the wonderful food. By eating mindfully, you’ll probably eat less yet enjoy those special holiday meals even more!
The key to mindful eating is to notice the details. Pretend you’re writing an article about your Thanksgiving or other holiday meal for a gourmet magazine.
The following tips from Eat What You Love, Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle will help.
- Connect with others. Focus on the people you’re sharing your meal with. Engage in interesting conversations. Ask questions and really listen to your companions.
- Check your fuel gauge. Notice how hungry you are. If you aren’t hungry yet, become aware of the reasons you feel like eating anyway. If it’s for social reasons, then be social for awhile longer, then eat when you get hungry.
- Decide how you want to feel when you’re done. Stuffed and miserable? Or comfortable and content? Eating the right amount of food is not about being good but about feeling good. Fill your plate or order accordingly.
- Appreciate the setting. Mentally describe the table setting and the ambiance. Notice the aromas, colors, textures, and presentation of the meal.
- Express gratitude. Before eating, take a moment to be truly thankful about where your food came from, including all the people who invested their time, effort, and talent to get it from farm to plate.
- Be selective. Choose food carefully by asking yourself what you want and what you need. Don’t waste your appetite on cranberry sauce shaped like a can if you don’t love it!
- Eat one bite at a time! Put one small bite in your mouth. You only have taste buds on your tongue so the flavors of a large bite of food are lost on your teeth, cheeks, and the roof of your mouth.
- Notice the texture and flavors. Pause to taste the food then slowly begin to chew. Breathe since flavors other than salty, sweet, bitter, and sour actually come from the aromas.
- Set your fork down. If you begin to load your next forkful your attention will be on the next bite, not the one you’re eating now. And if you’re focused on the next bite of food instead of the one you’re eating, you won’t stop eating until there are no more forkfuls.
- Pause. Sit for a moment and let the flavors and experience linger before you take the next bite.
- Keep checking in. Notice as the food gently fills your stomach. Pause for several minutes in the middle of eating to reconnect with your hunger and fullness levels and enjoyment of the meal.
- Remember abundance! Food is plentiful this time of year (actually, all year for many of us). Remind yourself that you can eat more later or at another meal, so there’s no need to eat it all now and ruin the experience by being too stuffed.
Mindful eating is a great way to enjoy Thanksgiving and other meals more while eating less.
You’ll be thankful that you did!
Michelle May, M.D. is a recovered yoyo dieter and the award-winning author of Eat What You Love,
Love What You Eat: How to Break Your Eat-Repent-Repeat Cycle. Download chapter one at http://amihungry.com/chapter1.