This movement advocates paying attention to every mouthful. Here are the essentials.

Mindful eating was a movement that started at the end of the nineties in the United States, which aims to give people a healthy relationship with food, appreciating all its goodness (flavours, vitamins, colours, smells, textures).

This philosophy urges us to understand our own bodies, to listen to their needs and, through meditation, visualisation, and other techniques, to be aware of how much food we need at any given time. Rather than diets and strict rules, it is less concerned with what we eat than with how and why we eat it. In short, mindful eating seeks to make us aware of physical sensations (such as hunger and satiety) and the emotions caused by ingredients.

This method suggests we learn new daily eating habits, without restrictions or banned foods, to keep a healthy weight and attain long-term health benefits.

Keys to mindful eating

1. Make small changes to your habits

Much of the motivation for improving well-being lies in changing our eating habits. The following may sound familiar: don’t skip breakfast, have five meals a day, make each mealtime an important moment, drink two litres of water a day, eat low fat and sugar foods and try to stay away from processed foods.

2. Prepare your food

Before you go shopping, check what you need to buy (the fresher the food, the better for your body). When you are in the store, stick to your list and don’t go near the more tempting aisles. Having a shopping list written in stone will save you time and money, and it’s healthier, too.

3. Eat a variety of foods

No single food can provide your body with all the nutrients that it needs. That’s why your diet should be as varied as possible, to strengthen the immune system. Nothing is out of bounds, you can eat anything in moderate amounts.

Balance your consumption of white meat and fish, have two or three servings of oily fish a week and choose whole pasta, rice and bread (although it has the same calories as white versions, it contains more fibre and minerals).

4. Only eat when you are hungry

When you go to eat something, ask yourself why. Sometimes it is anger, stress or loneliness that drives us to eat. This “emotional hunger” tends to be satiated with high-calorie foods such as biscuits, chocolate, crisps, etc. However, physiological (real) hunger has no preference for certain foods, since it is a response to a survival mechanism.

5. Before eating, drink water

Liquids satiate and soothe anxiety. Sometimes we mistake thirst for hunger, and eat when we should drink.

6. Savour every mouthful

Chew and activate all your senses every time you put your fork in your mouth. One mindful eating exercise involves taking a raisin, a segment of mandarin orange or a piece of chocolate and tasting it step by step.

1) Look at it as though you had never seen one before. Observe the colour, surface, shape…

2) Harness your sense of smell, close your eyes and think about how the smell makes you feel.

3) Place it on your tongue. Don’t bite it. Feel the texture, flavour and temperature. Then, bite into it, and perceive how it slowly collapses.

4) Feel it go down your digestive tract towards your stomach. Can you taste it?

7. Take your time

Always eat sitting down at the table and use cutlery. This orderly ritual prepares you mentally to eat calmly. Chew slowly, tasting your food. This will help you to digest it better. Put the cutlery down on the plate between mouthfuls.

8. Satisfied but not full

Don’t stuff yourself with food. On a scale of one to ten, stick at seven. Use smaller plates, to avoid the temptation of piling up the food and eating larger servings than you need.

Improve your routines, get regular physical exercise, thinking about what you eat and maintaining a healthy weight should not have deadlines and dates. It is a continuous learning process for creating your future ‘self’.

If you are what you eat, why would you expect to feel good when you feed yourself badly?

This post is also available in: Italian