Mindful Eating Has Nothing to Do With Dieting—Here’s How to Try It at Home

Mindfulness, the practice of focusing your attention fully on the present moment in a non-judgmental way, can be done as a formal, scheduled meditation. But it is also an approach or attitude that can be applied to any other activity or aspect of your daily life. You can choose to practice mindfulness while brushing your teeth, for example, going for a run or a walk, drinking cocktails at happy hour, or spending time with your kids. 

You can also try mindful eating, employing the present-focused mental state of mindfulness during mealtimes to help you savor the experience, better understand your own unique hunger and satiety cues, promote better digestion, and bring intentional awareness and appreciation to every bite of food.

What Is Mindful Eating? 

Mindful eating is the practice of eating with awareness and intention, of purposely noticing the experience of eating without judgment, says Minh-Hai Alex, RDN, registered dietitian nutritionist and yoga teacher at the private practice Mindful Nutrition in Seattle, Washington. There’s no one way to do it, and, most importantly, mindful eating is not a list of rules of how to eat, Alex says. It’s not necessarily about making yourself eat slower, either, as some may think.

It involves reorienting your focus to being present when eating, adds Ayana Habtemariam, MSW, RDN, LDN, a registered dietitian and certified intuitive eating counselor based in Arlington, Virginia. During the meal, you'd maybe notice how you’re experiencing that meal, bite by bite, sensation by sensation. You could pay special attention, perhaps, to the five senses, noticing the tastes, textures, temperature, and anything else occurring in the moment. Or it could be noticing that you’re distracted during a meal—without trying to explain it to yourself, understand it, fix it—you’d just notice it with curiosity and objectivity. These are all observations you can make with mindful eating, Alex says.

The Benefits of Mindful Eating

It helps you prioritize your own internal needs and feelings over external pressures and perceptions.

“Somebody who has been steeped in diet culture is usually practicing a form of externalized eating, where they're relying on all these external rules [to determine what and how they eat],”  Alex says. “Practicing mindful eating is an opportunity to shift from the external toward what's happening internally."

It helps you recognize physical and mental cues around food.

“It is an opportunity to actually experience the food you eat and help you figure out what you like and dislike,” Habtemariam says. “Some of us don't even know what we like because we're so used to following rules.” This allows for more pleasure and satisfaction from food. You also learn to honor what your body wants and needs, and get accustomed to listening to and meeting your hunger. 

It helps lower stress and improve digestion.

Practicing mindfulness has also been found to help activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or our “rest and digest” state (the opposite of our stressed-out flight-or-flight state). Therefore, research has suggested that mindful eating could play a role in supporting healthier digestion and nutrient absorption, Alex says, by promoting this relaxed, stress-free state ideal for digestion.

Mindful Eating Is Not a Diet

Both experts emphasize that mindful eating was not developed for weight loss or modifying your body shape in any way. “If your end goal is to manipulate your body in some sort of way, it's no longer mindful because you're not truly connecting to yourself and actually listening to your body, and instead of noticing whether you're feeling satisfied, you’d be focused now on changing your body,” Habtemariam says.

Is Mindful Eating Safe for Everyone?

Most people can benefit from mindful eating, Habtemariam says. That said, both experts agree that if someone has an eating disorder, or is fearful of food and may not want to be so present with food, then receiving nutritional rehabilitation or counseling is recommended before suggesting they do mindful eating, especially on their own.

How to Practice Mindful Eating

Ground yourself in the present.

Before delving into mindful eating, Alex suggests helping yourself feel comfortable and safe in order to be present. “Safety is a prerequisite for mindfulness,” Alex says. You may want to develop self-compassion or do a grounding exercise like noticing the chair you’re sitting in or your feet on the floor, the objects that you see, the cutlery you’re using, or the tree outside the window.

“Our nervous system is constantly asking, am I safe or is there a threat?” Alex explains. “So [by doing this] you’re telling your nervous system there’s no threat here.”

Leave all judgments aside.

A primary part of fostering safety for yourself is removing judgment from what you’re noticing. Internal rules, like labeling certain foods or certain behaviors around food as “good” or ‘bad’, can be a huge barrier to being mindful. When you judge yourself as bad for standing while eating, for example, there’s immediate shame and guilt, which can make it harder to be present because it feels too painful, Alex says. 

But you also shouldn’t pass judgment on yourself for having these internal rules or judgments either. If you find that you hold these rules or have negative thoughts about something—simply take note of it. Acknowledge them by saying aloud or thinking something like, “I notice that I believe this X is unhealthy for me,” then gently redirect your attention back to how the food tastes, smell, feels, and so on.

Start with one, small, mindful eating exercise.

Once you’ve prepared a safe space for you to be present in, you can try applying mindfulness to your eating. Alex and Habtemariam say the practice of mindful eating needs to be individualized for every person. To find out what might make sense for you to try, Habtemariam suggests experimenting with different ways of practicing mindful eating. 

“If something starts feeling like a chore or a rule, it's going to cause more harm,” Habtemariam says. If you find yourself becoming more rigid around the practice and getting frustrated that you’re doing it "wrong" or not as often as you should, Habtemariam recommends cutting down the frequency: Go from every day to just once a day, from once a day to a couple of times a week. Do what works for you. 

Below, both experts share a few ideas for you to test out:

• Notice how the food tastes and whether you like it.
• Take one mindful bite at each meal.
• Take one deep breath before eating to reorientate yourself to the present moment.
• Reduce distractions and create a calming environment: Put your phone or reading materials away, turn the TV off, and clear off the kitchen table.
• Have a visual cue that reminds you to step into mindfulness, like a candle, flower, or plant at your eating space.
• Notice the texture, mouthfeel, sound, smell, or appearance of the food.
• Notice that you’re really hungry and that you’re eating at a faster pace—or that you’re not that hungry and that you’re eating at a slower pace.
• Notice whether you’re standing or sitting while eating.
• Notice how the food feels in your body.