Mindful eating during the Christmas holidays

Let’s say it as soon as possible: there is no carte blanche to eat during the Christmas holidays and that’s not exactly bad news. If you have been re-educating your eating habits and improving your nutrition for some time, now it is time to incorporate mindfulness at the table. In other words, if you are conscious while eating, not distracted by your phone and not watching TV, you will be more attentive to the satiety signal your brain sends to you and you will eat less. You won’t have to do much more than pay attention to the food and to the way and speed with which you eat it, while you eat.

If this holiday season you start practicing Mindful Eating, it will be a sign that you have deactivated bad habits and dysfunctional patterns in your relationship with food. We usually grant the act of eating the power to make up for deficiencies and needs other than hunger. We eat out of boredom, out of loneliness, at the insistence of our environment or simply because we have food on our plate. Hunger is the last thing included into the equation.

Mindful eating consists precisely in applying the principles of Mindfulness to the act of eating, paying attention and giving intention to the thoughts, emotions, physical sensations and behaviours we have before, during and after eating.

Psychologists and nutritionists call these ways of eating intake styles. They describe at least three of them: the restrictive style, related to a diet and prohibition mentality that is unsustainable in the long term; the emotional style, which consists of using food to manage emotions; and external eating, which occurs when the desire to eat is triggered by external stimuli that have nothing to do with ourselves, such as the display of food, smells or colours. These eating styles increase the disconnection with the brain’s hunger and satiety signals.

Mindful eating proposes to bypass all that by paying attention during the act of eating, so that our internal signals do not escape us. To this end, it proposes balancing three fundamental forces: satisfaction, understood as the pleasure of eating and the well-being it brings us; care, understood as attention to physical, psychological, emotional and social needs; and health, which relates to the quality of what we eat.

How to activate conscious eating?

Mindful eating involves feeling and perceiving the smells, tastes and textures of food, thus engaging all five senses, enjoying more, and being more attentive.

It also means slowing down the speed at which we eat, in order to achieve greater concentration and connection with our bodies.

Finally, mindful eating allows us to become aware of physical hunger and satiety cues in order to decide what, when and how much to eat. This will minimise the times when we eat for other reasons.

The benefits of training and practising mindful eating are many, one of the key ones being to create a positive mindset around food and to make the experience of eating less confrontational and not interfered with by negative thoughts about weight gain.

When we eat consciously, we pay attention to what kind of food we eat and how much we eat. In this way, we can reduce overeating as we become more aware of the brain’s signals.

Numerous studies encourage the use of mindful eating as a strategy to combat overweight and obesity. In 2019, the journal Obesity Reviews published a meta-analysis of trials with very positive results.

Possibly, obesity one of the most interesting areas in the use of mindful eating to redirect a disturbed eating behaviour towards healthier eating behaviour.