Mindful Eating After The Festive Period

Ease into a healthy eating routine with mindful eating after the festive period. Feeling bloated and heavy after Christmas and New Year? Comfort eating after the latest lockdown announcement? January is a great time to refocus on healthy eating habits. But what’s the best way to do it?

The concept of “mindful eating” combines behavioural psychology with daily habits to help you eat better, feel more energised, and meet your physique goals – without dieting.

What is “mindful eating”?

If we only ever ate when we needed the energy, it would be relatively easy to manage our physique and training performance goals.

But we’re human, not robots, and we eat for a multitude of reasons detached from hunger. You might recognise this in yourself as emotional eating, boredom eating, eating as procrastination, or eating simply because the food is in easy reach.

Mindful eating is the practice of being intentional with what, when, and how much you eat. It doesn’t necessarily eliminate all emotional eating. But it encourages a mindful pause before eating, which gives you the opportunity to choose a different behaviour.

Why is mindful eating important?

Overeating leads to excess calorie intake, which is a problem if you have a fat loss or body recomp goal. Mindless eating doesn’t tick any nutrition goals either, as it typically involves consuming snacks

As Dr Brian Wansink explains in his book “Mindless Eating – Why We Eat More Than We Think” (1), most of us don’t overeat because of hunger.

“We overeat because of family and friends, packages and plates, names and numbers, labels and lights, colours and candles, shapes and smells, distractions and distances, cupboards and containers.”

By bringing mindfulness to nutrition, we will eat better quality foods, at more appropriate times, in amounts that support our goals.

Mindless eating

Mindless eating can quickly lead to excess caloric intake, poor food choices, or embedding damaging habits around food.

1 – Boredom eating

2 – Procrastinating by eating

3 – Emotional eating (loneliness, anger, sadness)

4 – Overeating by not paying attention to the food

5 – Eating something “because it’s there”

The science of mindful eating

According to Wansink, we overlook up to 200 daily food decisions. (2) Many of these are influenced by consumption norms – emotional triggers, the environment around you, what others are doing. Mindful eating is linked with a lower BMI (3) and with choosing smaller serving sizes of food (4).

As researcher Joseph B. Nelson wrote in his 2017 paper “Mindful Eating: The Art of Presence While You Eat” (5) “eating mindfully is a practice that requires a commitment to behaviour change similar to that needed for any diet or eating plan.”

A mindful eating approach might include these actions and choices:

* Pausing before you reach for food, to notice what you are feeling. Make a considered choice

* If you aren’t hungry, do something else more appropriate for what you are feeling

* Eat without distractions and pay attention to your food

* Appreciate the process that brought the food to you

* Check in with your body as you eat, and stop when you’ve had enough

* Why not do an audit on your daily eating decisions and habits to identify the mindless ones and bring more mindfulness to your eating?

5 ways to do mindful eating after the festive period

#1 Don’t eat at your desk, in front of the TV, or whilst scrolling social media.

#2 Use smaller plates and bowls. Research suggests we feel fuller after eating an entire plate of food from a smaller plate.

#3 Move serving bowls and leftovers away from where you are eating to prevent mindless extra helpings.

#4 Make it easier to get to healthy food, and harder to get to unhealthy food. Put foods you are likely to overeat in containers and on high shelves.

#5 Pause and think before you eat. Be aware of your emotions.

1 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Mindless-Eating-More-Than-Think/dp/0739340379

2  https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227344004_Mindless_Eating_The_200_Daily_Food_Decisions_We_Overlook

3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12671-012-0124-3

4 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0195666313001207

5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5556586/,

Written by Nicola Joyce

Nicola is a specialist freelance copywriter for the fitness industry @thefitwriter