Mindful eating | Paying attention to what's in your mouth can help whittle your waist

Have you ever looked down at your empty dinner plate and thought: Where did that food go? You know you’ve eaten, in fact you still have the taste in your mouth, but you can’t actually remember doing it. With your mind focused on work, kids or the TV, you’ve consumed a whole meal and barely registered a bite. You’ve been doing some mindless eating.

 

Mindless eating happens for many reasons, although it’s largely a function of how busy modern life is. It’s rare for us to be doing one single task, fully present and aware of every moment. Instead, for much of the day we’re juggling work and family, other people’s needs and schedules, and constantly adjusting out mental to-do lists. In fact, there’s so much to manage that eating has become just another task to squeeze into the day.

 

 

If you’re not really conscious of what you’re eating, it’s easy to end up eating more; more than you need and more than is good for the waistline. Research has shown that people who practice mind-ful eating – being aware of what they’ve eaten and registering when they’re full – are less likely to be obese than mind-less eaters. Watching TV, reading the newspaper, listening to the radio, even talking to friends during a meal – these are all distracting. If your mind is multitasking while you are eating, important messages about taste, texture and food satisfaction may not really register in your brain. Too busy with other tasks, your brain continues to send out the message to your body that you’re hungry, and you continue to eat, slowly but surely piling on the kilos.

Spend a few moments thinking about what you ate yesterday. Can you even remember? Is there perhaps one meal that’s particularly clear, or one that’s a complete blur? Can you remember the taste of everything you ate? No? What about what you ate this morning?

 

Even without being mindful about it, we make more than 200 food decisions on average every day. Should I have breakfast or not? If yes, should I have it now or after a shower? Cereal or toast? What to have on the toast? On and on, and so far you haven’t even taken a bite. Our day is packed with decisions about the food we eat, and many of them zoom by so quickly we don’t even realise we’re making them.

But if you don’t notice you’re making those choices, you’re much more susceptible to all sorts of outside influences, including the size of the plate, names and labels on packets, how much the people around you are eating, distractions, what’s in the cupboard, where you are, even what a TV chef served up last night. All these things can shape your food choices, and often they influence you to eat more.