Eating mindfully helps you control your weight

Food and emotions

People who want to lose weight generally know which foods to prioritize and which to avoid. The real challenge is more to question why and how we eat. For example, recent studies show that structuring your meals and eating them together helps control your weight. In the same way, eating too quickly promotes excess weight.

Conscious eating would also be a good strategy for controlling your weight, according to the results of a study published in the journal Current Obesity Reports. Because food should not allow us to adjust or cope with our emotions.

However, as explained by Dr Jean-Jacques Colin, nutritionist and specialist in overweight and eating disorders, “Eating is not only for nourishment. Eating also serves to regulate one’s emotions and it is a completely physiological function. Which means that one can want to eat without being hungry but simply to comfort oneself.”

Eating also helps regulate your emotions

Mindfulness can help us better manage these emotions. It allows you to follow thoughts, feelings, or perceptions and observe them without trying to interact with them or modify them. This means maintaining a detached awareness, without any form of judgment, to become more aware of your body, your life and your environment.

Eat consciously to control your weight

In this study, researchers listed 34 articles on mindful eating and weight (loss, gain, control). Mindful eating increases a person’s sensitivity to physical signs of hunger, satiety signals, pace of eating, food environment, and food characteristics.

Results: all studies resulted in weight loss. 4 of 5 long-term studies even showed that weight loss continued over time. Only one study reported weight gain after the intervention. Globally The effects of mindful eating remain modest, but this strategy can help maintain diet efforts over the long term. and thus have a significant effect.

Mindfulness can especially help resist cravings. For example, if you have decided to eat healthily and you indulge in a piece of cake, you will feel so guilty about your lack of willpower that to appease this feeling you will eat the rest of the cake. Once you become aware of these patterns, the next step is to figure out how to resist these cravings. Avoiding tempting foods is difficult because the offer is everywhere. This is where mindfulness can help by teaching you to overcome these urges and the feelings that accompany them by accepting that these sensations or feelings are temporary. It can also be useful for changing eating behavior (eating more slowly, for example).

How to eat mindfully

With mindful eating, you learn to eat slowly and with full dedication to your meal. You must eat when you are hungry and stop eating when you are full, you resist urges to eat that are not hunger, you listen to your sensations caused by food and above all you learn to manage guilt and anxiety related to food.

For Dr Jean-Jacques Colin, author of Large CBT book for eating in peace, “Mindfulness does not directly allow you to manage your weight but it allows you to better observe the signals of hunger and satiation, to become aware of them and to respect them, which naturally leads to a regulated diet: eating what you need.”

How to adopt mindfulness? Start gradually with one meal per day or week taken at a slower pace, paying attention to what and how you eat.

Some tips:

• Use a timer, set for 20 minutes, and give yourself this time to eat a normal-sized meal.
• Eat silently for 5 minutes, thinking about everything it took to benefit from this meal, from the sun’s rays to the skill of the cook to the grocery store.
• Eat in small bites and chew well.
• Start your meal last and match your pace to the person who eats the slowest at the table.