How Mindful Eating Improves Your Relationship with Food | Expert Videos

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research has shown that mindful eating can help with weight maintenance and weight loss more importantly mind bleeding can result in greater acceptance and awareness of our choices increased self-esteem and just generally more positivity around food hi i'm sarah ramotsky i'm the director of healthcare partnerships at headspace and i'm a registered dietitian and i'm really passionate about helping people integrate mindfulness into their eating habits so i get this question a lot what is mindful eating unfortunately in today's climate there's too much focus on restriction and that can give us a negative relationship with food there's no one in the world that thinks eating a french fry will make them healthier so you already know a lot of information about what to put in your mouth but mindful eating takes a different approach it looks at the why of eating and not the what i know i'm a dietitian but this is not a diet it's about improving your relationship with food and the thoughts that drive our choices it's easy to forget that our bodies actually have cues that tell us if we're hungry because we've stopped listening to them take portion sizes for instance it's probably not news to anyone that in america we're served way bigger portion sizes than we actually need research has shown that when we're presented with large portion sizes we actually end up eating more than we need to even the sight and smell of food can make us think that we're actually hungrier than we really are so how do you know when it's time to stop eating a great technique is something we call the hunger scale it's a tool that's used across mindful eating and it works like this before you sit down to eat think about a scale from one to five one being starving and five be neither hungry nor full your goal when you go into a meal is to be around the three so you're hungry but you're not just eating for the sake of it then when you eat imagine the same scale but now you're going all the way to ten ten would be you being completely stuffed during a meal your goal is to stop around a seven so you're satisfied but you're not so full that you feel physically uncomfortable for many this may be hard at first and you may find that you still have food on your plate when you get to seven but over time as you start listening to your internal cues you'll learn to gauge how much food you need to actually fill you up it's really quite amazing when you start using this scale and compare to what you were eating or what you served at restaurants this is what actually you need to fill you up not anymore and not any less and you're not being influenced by anything except how much your body needs multiple studies have shown that people who use this scale report healthier body positivity higher self-esteem and they were better at maintaining a healthier weight note i said healthier weight it's not about trying to reach some arbitrary number on a scale most diets are about restriction and if you're restricting your food choices you're probably not listening to your internal hunger cues and here's the thing most diets don't actually work in the long term in fact according to one recent study people who practice mindful eating are much more likely to stick with that practice as compared to people who are on a traditional restrictive diet so i know what you're probably thinking does this mean i can't eat the foods that i want you'll be happy to hear that the answer is no let's say you just had lunch and you're going to the movies and you just can't imagine not having popcorn you can still have the popcorn because if you've been paying attention you already know what i'm going to say this is not a diet as long as you're recognizing why you're eating you're still training yourself to make better food choices just by being aware like meditation mindful eating doesn't require you to do it perfectly every time the important thing is that you're making an effort to be a little bit more mindful every day and over time if you're consistent you'll start to feel the benefits i'm sara ramotsky thanks so much for watching and i'll see you again soon