Eating Mindfully
Eating mindfully is giving your full attention to your food, no matter what you are eating!
When I get a bite to eat with a new friend, they quickly learn there are several foods which I avoid. This isn’t some diet plan to maintain my weight, or because I am jumping on the bandwagon with the latest fad (although I have tried both in the past with little success). I do it because I have found I feel my best when I eat mindfully, listening to what my body wants and needs. Eating mindfully starts with being aware of what you put into your body and how your body reacts to that food.
Messages from your body
While I don’t have any food allergies (nothing you feed me will land me in the ER), I have several food intolerances. Eating dairy does a number on my digestive system, wheat makes me feel like I have a low grade cold, deep fried/fatty foods as well as super salty items can give me a migraine, sugar makes my skin break out. And sadly, chocolate now gives me migraines as well – chalk that one up to shifting body chemistry as I enter perimenopause.
You might wonder how I can connect each of these food items to a specific symptom or set of symptoms. I was lucky – at a young age, my mother taught us to pay attention to what we are eating how our bodies reacted to that food. I learned what to eat and not eat from an elimination diet as a kid, I have had some very fancy blood allergy testing for food done (twice), and for many years, I have done mini-elimination diets if I suspected a food was causing issues. If you are interested in learning more about elimination diets, make sure to catch tomorrow’s post!
This all boils down to one simple thing – I have learned to listen to my body. I can usually tell from the smell or look of something now if my body is interested or not. You know that feeling you get when you find a lost tub of hummus in the back of the fridge growing more species of mold than the Amazon rainforest? That immediate “NO” in your stomach at the thought of even putting that into your body? Maybe your throat even closes up a little to prevent you from even swallowing? That is how my body reacts now when presented with the foods which I know cause issues for me.
Training your mind to listen
This didn’t happen overnight, I had to train my mind to understand the messages coming from my body. Take a minute, think, can you remember the last time you felt healthy. Like really healthy? If you are like me when I am not careful of what I am eating, you might feel tired, run down, loggy or foggy, your stomach might always feel a little bit off, not sick per say, but just not quite right.
The first step to training your mind to listen to your body is to pay attention when you eat. As you bring food up to your mouth, what is your reaction to the smell of the food. How about the taste. Does it light up your tastebuds? Or does it leave an unpleasant feeling on your tongue? When you swallow, does it go down easily, or do you feel your body resist a little?
If your body is sending you signs that it doesn’t want to eat something, put the food down. Take a sip of water. Take a deep breath. Tune into your body, listen to your stomach – are you actually hungry, or are you just eating out of habit? If you are hungry, try something else, repeat the mindful eating process, again listening to what your body is telling you about the food.
Continue to stay mindful while you eat. Check in with your stomach, listen to when it starts to feel full. Eat until you are almost full – stop before you reach that feeling of fullness. Remember there is still food traveling through your system. If you stop eating once you are actually full, then you will be overfull by the time it all lands in your stomach.
Agni – the fire in your belly
In yoga, we discuss agni (fire in Sanskrit). Agni is important in several aspects of a yogic practice and lifestyle, but here we are talking about agni in terms of your physical digestion.
You need to leave room for the fire if you want it to burn.
Imagine building a fire in a wood stove – if you have never used a wood stove, remember this is a small metal box with a door on it, it is a contained space. If you put so much wood into the stove that the wood was touching all six sides, you would have trouble lighting the fire without any room for the air which feeds the fire to move.
Your stomach is like that wood stove. If you pack it so full of food that there is no room left, aside from being uncomfortable, the agni or digestive fire will have trouble burning the food to extract the nutrients you need from it. Eating mindfully – only when we are hungry and stopping just before we are full – allows our bodies to digest food in an efficient manner, giving us more energy and preventing discomfort.
Mindful eating as a meditation
Mindfulness is simply the art of being present, of being alert and aware in the moment. Mindful eating is a good way to practice this simple technique which can usher a whole host of benefits into your life!
To practice mindful eating (or in this case drinking although you could do this exercise with food) as a meditation, pour the beverage (hot or cold) of your choice into a glass. Sit down in a quiet space where you can have a few uninterrupted moments with your beverage. Bring the cup up to your face, take a deep inhale, what does it smell like? What is the temperature of the cup, how does it feel in your hands? Listen closely – is your drink carbonated and making bubbling noises, are you holding a handmade mug which makes sounds as you move your fingers along it? What does your drink look like – what color is it, is it thick like whole milk or thin like a cup of tea? Finally, take a sip of your beverage, hold it in your mouth, swish it around bathing all of your tastebuds. What does it taste like? As you swallow your beverage, what does that feel like in your body?
The technique is about using your full senses to immerse yourself in your beverage. To be fully absorbed by the process of learning about the drink before you consume it. I recently heard an interview with Bernadette Keough, a mindfulness expert, who suggested trying this practice with the first bite (or sip) you take of each thing you eat.
The joy diet
I rediscovered an article by Dr. Laura Koniver recently. I had read it several years ago, and while it made sense to me, it didn’t hit the same chord as when I reread it a few weeks ago. In this article, she discusses what she calls the Joy Diet. “Every single thing that goes into my body has to bring me joy, or I don’t put it in my mouth. If I don’t like it, no matter how healthy I think it is, I don’t eat it. And if I really love it, feeling no guilt whatsoever associated with it, I eat it!” This is more mindful eating.
Use your senses to examine the food, look at it, smell it, pick it up, taste it. Does your body say “YES” to the food? If so, there is probably something there you need (even if it might not be something traditionally viewed as “healthy”). Here is the catch though, you need to listen to your body, not your mind. Your mind might be saying – “I had a really hard day, I deserve a piece of cake” while your body is actually saying – “please don’t give me cake, I need a nice warm bowl of vegetable soup”.
Once you have trained your mind to listen to your body, not to talk over it, you can consider adding in additional layers. Dr. Koniver suggests that eating mindfully not only includes the food as it appears in front of you, but also how it got to your plate. She asks you to consider “how that food was produced, how it was prepared and the ingredients in it”. Do those steps also bring you joy? One example – I only eat eggs from “happy chickens”, for me that means free range or organic eggs. It might be a little more expensive, but for me it is worth the extra money to feel better about what I am putting into my body.
An ongoing process
Eating mindfully is an ongoing process. As I mentioned earlier, it is only recently that I have started having an issue with chocolate. I am someone who LOVES chocolate. At one of my old jobs, my co-workers used to keep a chocolate stash in the office to cheer me up if I was having a bad day. When I made the new connection between chocolate and my migraines, it was really hard. I would abstain for a few days and then try chocolate again, thinking maybe this time. . . But now, it is much easier to ignore the chocolate in the house, knowing that it will result in a migraine the next morning.
The flip side of this is that food which previously caused issues might be welcomed by your body in the future. There are several foods which I had tested as reactive to in the past which I have been able to reintroduce into my diet.
If this is a food which you had eaten in excess, think of it like rubbing salt in a wound. It will hurt and prevent the wound from healing, but if you give it time to heal, once healed, you can rub salt on your skin without a problem. (Although remember that if you constantly rub salt on your skin, you will create a wound through abrasion – similarly, don’t overdo it with a food you are reintroducing.)
Our bodies also change as we age. You may have heard the statistic that your body replaces almost all of its cells every seven years. A food your body once had issues with might become tolerated again as a result of your biochemical changes over time.
Again, the key is to eat mindfully, if you are attempting to reintroduce a food which bothered you in the past, be aware of how you feel both as you eat it and after. And remember – listen for the answers from your body, not your mind!
Wishing you health and wellbeing as you feed your body what it craves!
