“Mindful eating is about awareness. When you eat mindfully, you slow down, pay attention to the food you’re eating and savour every bite.” — Susan Albers
Mindful eating is a practice of awareness — paying attention to the food you’re eating, moment to moment, with the qualities of curiosity and non-judgement. It’s an approach to eating that focuses on your experience of the food by using your senses and self-awareness.
Mindful eating encourages you to take your time with meals by being conscious about how you eat and what you eat, as well as contemplating how what you eat nourishes you. The intention of mindful eating is to help you savour the present moment — and the food involved with it — and encourage your full presence for the whole experience of eating.
Tangible ways to practise mindful eating
• Formalise your mealtimes by setting your dining table with cosy features such as candles, linen and dining ware, and sit down at the table while you eat.
• Eat without distractions, such as your phone or the television, as this will help you to be more present with your food.
• Tune into your five senses — smell, sight, sound, touch and taste — and use them to deepen your experience of eating. Describe what you notice before and while you eat. For example, does your food taste sweet, sour or salty? What does your meal look like? What can you smell on your plate? What did the ingredients feel like while you were preparing your meal?
• Appreciate your meal. Mindful eating is a practice that celebrates the joy of eating. Take the time to really savour your meal, bite by bite, and appreciate everything that it took to bring the food together. Notice if this enhances your experience.
• Mindful eating is a practice that requires openness, curiosity and compassion with yourself. When you embrace these qualities with food, day to day, you may find that you’re more relaxed, at ease and flexible not just with what you eat, but also how you eat.
Similar to the way that mindfulness enriches your life outside of your formalised “practice”, mindful eating will enhance the rest of your life, too. Once you embody the teachings and wisdom of mindful eating at mealtimes, you may find that you’re more conscious, grounded and calm in everyday life. This is why the practice is so transformative, because it touches all the corners of your existence in order to help you feel more centred and content.
If you’d like to explore mindful eating in more depth, we share some insights on the concept in Being’s Mindfulness Workbook.
