How Mindful Eating Can Help with Weight Management and Body Acceptance

The pressure for people to maintain a certain weight and body image is even stronger than during previous generations. The constant exposure to idealised images on social media can cause body-bulimia, obsessively checking the mirror, a battle with food and, ultimately, suffering. A way out of this trap towards peace with food and one’s body is mindful eating.

Mindful eating is the cultivation of attention and the ability to be present to the experience of food, to bring awareness to our food thoughts and feelings, our internal experiences and how they are related to our eating habits, the flavour, taste and texture of the food, our hunger and fullness cues, and all sensations in the body that are related to eating. That’s a lot of mindfulness! It turns out that practising mindful eating could serve as a ‘miracle pill’ for weight loss and body acceptance.

Second, it can help with weight management by allowing you to develop a healthier relationship with food. When we’re mindful, we tend to eat a more nourishing diet, and we’re more willing to eat in moderation. This is because we are better able to listen to the signals from our body, and not confuse physical and real hunger with psychological or emotional hunger. Emotional eating (often triggered by stress, boredom or other emotions) can lead to overeating, and may contribute to weight gain. Being mindful can help you identify the triggers of emotional eating and to move to healthier ways to deal with your feelings.

And, adding on to this last point, mindful eating urges us to slow down and experience our food, instead of eating mindlessly. Today, we take a pound of lunch with us, eat in cars on the go, eat and work at our desks – whatever motivates those lateral blood-proliferation aneurysms the doctor shrugged off. We end up eating like the women do in zombie films, robotic scarfing without tasting or getting full – like some production-line Mercedes Benz assembly pieces with the line lit up and blinking. And, voilà, we put on those 10, 15, 20, 30 pounds between high school and college. Then another 10 or 15 between college and our first post-college job because we save and focus on survival – and save for that measly $9 latte every morning – but we have no time to really delight in the experience of our food or recognise when we’ve reached that peaceful plateau of three non-sugar strawberry cheesecake bites.

Binge eating, emotional eating, emotional overeating, food cravings, mindless eating, food addiction and body hatred are all issues that respond to the gentle subtle work of mindful eating. Have you ever stood in front of a mirror and tried to lift your breasts up to a higher position on your chest, to get them to look more ‘perky’ – like that fitness model that features on the front of your new summer top? Have you ever sucked in your stomach and held that slant across your mid-torso with tenseness, in hopes of making it look and feel flatter? Ever pinched your upper arms with a ‘pooch’ made from a handful of your own flesh, and whispered a little old lady inside your head: ‘See! See how disgusting you are?’ Me neither. I don’t know about you but all of these behaviours seem a little bit – how shall I put this? – nuts.

The more you’re able to be here, present and embodied, the less you have space for those thoughts and judgments. So you can start to de-activate that kind of thing. It helps you sense all sorts of things your body is telling you, helps you develop kindness, nurture your body, and have a healthy body-image at whatever size it is.

Moreover, with mindful eating we can also find our way out of the dieting maze – which often promises rapid weight loss but is unsustainable and, more than that, forces on us an unfair and negative relationship to food – because we restrict, deprive and punish ourselves far too much. Mindful eating can give back to us and our body a rich and varied nutritious diet eaten and enjoyed in harmony and balance with others – and with ourselves.

So, in conclusion, there are numerous benefits to practising mindful eating. It can help us to alleviate weight and our fear of being fat, and instead accept our bodies as we are. This can help us to make better food choices, avoid mindlessly grabbing unhealthy foods on the go, and give up on diets because we no longer depend on them to make weight. The next time you sit down at your table, take a big deep breath, slow down, and eat with love and awareness.

What is better for your body and mind than that?