28 – Mindless Eating

Let’s dive deeper into this “mindfulness” topic. More specifically, let’s discuss how mindfulness as it relates to food.

– I’ve left this subject as the very last lesson in particular because while emotional & mindless eating is very very common, not everyone does it and those who DO regularly do it, you would probably need some 1-2-1 intervention to sort it out. 

Mindless & Emotional eating is driven by our subconscious patterns of behaviour.  Luckily for you, I am currently the only Control Practitioner in Ireland who specialises in quickly changing subconscious patterns. 

If that’s something you’d like to know more about, let me know… anyway let’s crack on with the lesson.

Mindless Eating

There is often a connection between one’s emotions and the food one consumes. While this is very common it is something to be aware of.

If you come home from a long, stressful day at work, you might have a habit of going straight to the cupboard, grabbing a share-size bag of crisps and plopping down on the couch. Before you know it you ate over half the bag of crisps. This is what we call mindless eating.

You really did not think about it while you were eating (you were probably still steaming over your day), and before you even realize, you have consumed 600+ calories!

Mindless vs Present Eating

Our goal today is to differentiate between mindless eating and present eating.  

Here are a couple of tips to get you out of mindless eating:

• Slow down while you are eating so your body can recognise when it is full.
• Using a smaller plate for dinner instead of a larger one can help you reduce your food intake.
• Never eat directly out of a bag or box. Always put your food on a plate or in a bowl to know exactly how much you are going to be eating.
• DON’T PICK at the kiddo’s leftovers.  Bin them or save them (for your kids) to eat later. 
• Don’t nibble at ingredients when preparing food or putting away the groceries. 

How many times have you sat down to eat a meal and not really even noticed how the food tasted? Of course, you knew if you liked it or did not like it, but did you actually really taste it? What flavours could you recognise in your bites? What dishes went well together?

These are the types of questions that you can start asking yourself to try to get yourself into present eating. This is going to help pull your mind from wandering and bring your attention back on the task at hand – eating!

Doing one thing at a time instead of multitasking is hard. A lot of families will eat dinner while watching tv or checking their phones.  This mindless eating is hurting both our relationships with each other and our food, as well as our health. It can be very difficult to do but it’s important to just do one thing during dinner – eat good food.

Put all your energy and focus into your food and see what types of reward you get back. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at what a difference this can really make.