Mindful Eating (Part 1)
The Melius Approach to Nutrition is Not About Meal Plans or Dieting.
Instead, we want to help you:
Build the skills and the tools to have a lifelong, healthy approach to food that suits you and your lifestyle
Make sure you’re getting the nutrients that your mind and body need to function properly, while still enjoying your meals and snacks
Avoid feeling restricted or deprived
Feel “in control” around food
Identify when you’re actually hungry, and when those cravings are actually coming from somewhere else.
The last point in particular refers to ‘mindful eating’.
Mindful eating means being aware of the difference between eating when you’re hungry, and eating for other reasons.
Once you can improve your awareness around the what, when and why of certain eating behaviours, you’ll be able to reduce the likelihood of ‘emotional eating’ while building a healthier relationship with food.
Mindful eating forgets typical eating rules and instead involves adhering to cues from your body, like hunger and satiety (fullness). Most of us eat for a variety of reasons besides actual hunger :
Conventional norms around the time of day
Food left on the plate / table
Boredom or stress
Social situations
Think about how babies eat. They’re free of the habits and traditions that we as adults have ingrained into our routines.
Babies naturally eat intuitively; they stop when they’re full, regardless of whether there’s still food available. And they certainly don’t feel guilty or ashamed about what they’ve just eaten.
Mindful eating is about trying to get back to somewhere near this natural instinct.
When You’re Hungry, Eat.
It’s easy to be fooled by cravings that make you think you’re hungry, when in actual fact you’re stressed or bored (or, quite possibly, dehydrated!).
So how do we know when we’re truly hungry?
Ask yourself how hungry you feel on a scale of 1-10. Seven out of ten is probably a green light to eat something, but you might be a bit different and that’s fine, too!
Do a quick summary of the situation. Where are you and what are you doing? Did you just wander into the kitchen and find yourself standing in front of the fridge with little recollection of how you got there? That’s probably not hunger-related, and more likely the result of something else.
Practical Applications
Try to mentally take note of the times when you realise that you’ve eaten something when you weren’t actually getting physical hunger cues from your body (rumbling stomach, feeling weak, light-headed or irritable, etc). This is a really good skill to develop as it will help you better identify and understand what really works best for you.
Letting yourself be guided by hunger rather than timetables or tradition might mean you end up eating at new and ‘unorthodox’ times.
For example, you might find that you always wake up feeling super hungry, but in your regular routine you don’t have breakfast until later in the morning, or perhaps not at all. Try tuning into the signals that your body is sending you and go with them, even if a friend / neighbour / colleague / random person on social media says you have to do intermittent fasting because it works for everyone…
Awesome bonus : once people get away from subjecting themselves to deprivation or restriction, their cravings suddenly don’t feel so urgent anymore.
Thanks for reading!
