The holidays are a time to celebrate and enjoy festivities with friends and family. Since many celebrations and traditions center around food, it can be challenging for people trying to reach their health goals. Rather than waiting for the new year to set resolutions, consider practicing a technique called mindful eating throughout the holiday season.
Mindful eating stems from the concept of mindfulness, where you strive to be fully present with your thoughts, feelings, and emotions in any given moment without judgment. When you practice mindful eating, you’re fully present with what you’re thinking and feeling in relation to eating.
Some studies show that mindful eating can benefit those with disordered eating or chronic diseases, and can even help with weight loss. It shifts the focus away from what you should be eating and instead explores why you choose to eat and how you eat. This method of eating might be helpful for those who often find themselves eating to cope with stress or other emotions.
Step #1: Distinguish between emotional hunger and physical hunger
Eating based on physical hunger
The first step to mindful eating is learning to get in touch with your hunger and fullness cues. Eating when you’re physically hungry can help prevent mindless snacking or overeating later. Signs of physical hunger include stomach grumbling, low energy levels, headache, or even difficulty concentrating.
Use the hunger and fullness scale below to practice rating your hunger/fullness on a scale of 1-10. Avoid waiting until you’re ravenous (1-2) to eat because that often leads to overeating. Try to get something to eat when you’re beginning to feel hungry (3-4). Stop eating around a 6 where you feel satisfied but could eat a little more. Then wait about 20 minutes, and you’ll get to a 7, where you feel comfortably full. Eating until 8-10 frequently when you feel stuffed or overly full could lead to indigestion, heartburn, reflux, and potentially unwanted weight gain.
Hunger and fullness scale.
What about emotional hunger?
Emotional hunger is different from physical hunger because it often stems from a specific emotion that you may be feeling, whether it’s sadness, loneliness, boredom, anxiety, or even happiness. You could be feeling stressed about work and reach for a snack or bored at home and reach for a tub of ice cream. Food can be comforting, and sometimes we eat for reasons other than physical hunger, which is OK. However, when you regularly eat outside of physiological hunger, it becomes harder to maintain a healthy weight.
How to handle food cravings
Many people often struggle with food cravings, especially sweet, salty, and greasy foods. It’s normal to want to eat these types of foods because we’re biologically programmed to want them. However, it’s important to pay attention to whether these cravings are actually due to physical hunger versus emotional hunger.
If you find yourself eating a bag of chips whenever you feel anxious or are sitting in front of the TV, ask yourself, “Am I actually hungry?” If you’re not physically hungry, try to find a way to manage what you’re feeling without food, such as going for a quick walk or listening to music. Cravings typically fade with time. If the craving doesn’t go away within several days, it’s OK to eat a reasonable portion of the food slowly and mindfully.
Step #2: Build your meal or snack
Once you’ve determined that you’re actually physically hungry (3-4 on the hunger/fullness scale), it’s time to prepare your meal or snack. Use the MyPlate method to build a balanced meal consisting of a starch, protein, and fruit or vegetable. Ensuring that your meal has these components will help you feel more satisfied and optimize your nutrition. Ideally, keep your plate or bowl about half filled with vegetables or fruit, a quarter filled with protein (chicken, fish, tofu, meat, or beans), and a quarter filled with starch (rice, noodles, poi, etc.). Incorporating up to three servings of low-fat dairy products or non-dairy substitutes daily can also provide important nutrients such as calcium and vitamin D.
When building a healthy snack, try to incorporate protein and a fruit or vegetable. Balanced snacks would include an apple with peanut butter, yogurt with berries, and vegetable sticks with hummus or dip. If you’re snacking on foods such as nuts, chips, or popcorn, pour out a portion into a small bowl to avoid overeating.
Step #3: Savor your food
How often do you eat while working, driving, watching TV, or on your phone? If you eat while distracted, it’s harder to gauge how hungry or full you are. When possible, sit down while eating to help ground yourself. Minimize distractions and eat together with friends, family, or co-workers. Eating with others can also help you pace your eating while engaging in conversation. Enjoy the scent, texture, and taste of your food. Think about whether you like the food you’re eating. Take sips of water throughout your meal to help with digestion.
Step #4: Allow time to digest
If you scarf down your meal in five minutes or less, it’s easy to overeat. Allow at least 20-30 minutes to eat and digest your meal. If you’re still hungry after 20-30 minutes, it’s OK to get more food; however, try to slow down when you eat. Chewing your food thoroughly helps break it down into smaller pieces, which can aid with digestion. Eating slowly and sitting up for at least two hours after a meal can help prevent reflux and indigestion.
Mindful eating exercise
Mindful eating takes practice and repetition. Try this mindful eating exercise with a small piece of food, such as a raisin or piece of chocolate.
- Hold the food in your hand or use a utensil.
- Look at the food and observe its color, shape, and visible texture.
- Touch the food with your fingers and note how it feels. Is it soft or hard? Sticky or smooth? Hot or cold?
- Smell the food and note its fragrance.
- Place the food gently in your mouth without tasting it. Notice any changes happening in your mouth.
- Chew the food and notice how the food breaks down in your mouth. Does it taste sweet, sour, salty, or bland? Do you like the taste?
- Swallow the food and feel it traveling down your throat.
- Notice how you feel after eating the food. How was this experience different from how you normally eat? How can you apply this exercise to your eating habits?
This exercise helps you to be fully present while exploring food using multiple senses. When you eat mindfully, you may find you only need one small slice of pie or one cookie to feel satisfied rather than larger servings. Try this exercise with your favorite holiday food or dessert and notice the difference!
Learn more about mindful eating
Check out these resources to learn more about the benefits of mindful eating.
- The Center for Mindful Eating
- Intuitive Eating: A Revolutionary Program that Works by Evelyn Tribole, M.S., R.D., and Elyse Resch, M.S., R.D., F.A.D.A.
- Eating Mindfully: How to End Mindless Eating and Enjoy a Balanced Relationship with Food by Susan Albers, Psy.D., and Lilian Cheung, D.Sc., R.D.
- Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More than We Think by Brian Wansink, Ph.D.
- Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life by Thich Nhat Hanh and Lilian Cheung D.Sc., R.D.
Kristie Yeung was born and raised in Honolulu and has worked as a registered dietitian in Massachusetts, Indiana, Maryland, and Hawaii in clinical nutrition, maternal and infant health, and public health nutrition. Kristie loves helping to make nutrition information accessible to everyone.
