What is Mindful Eating? | YogaRenew

Transcript

so mindful eating is basically a practice that we do every day to learn more about our thoughts emotions feelings our actions and reactions in order to cultivate health and contentment it is also about learning how to access our inner world or what we call Inner wisdom by listening to our body cues of hunger fullness and society and to use the qualities or characteristics of mindfulness in how we approach food our bodies and our entire lives mindful eating is flexible eating eating for enjoyment eating imbalance with what the body needs with mindful eating we cultivate a healthy relationship with food where we can enjoy it without the feelings of guilt and shame we can enjoy food without restriction or deprivation which most often brings anxiety and a sense of struggle for a lot of people the sense of struggle is displayed by wanting to lose weight but deep down inside they want to release themselves from the pain and burden of being obsessed with food and making hundreds of food related choices every day we learn how to free our minds from being preoccupied with food Weight and Body Image and all of this energy can be given to other important areas of Our Lives mindful eating is flexible eating because your life and eating cannot be the same every day today you're invited for dinner tomorrow you're going to the movies next month you're going on vacation so it's not realistic or sustainable to eat the same food every day so mindful eating brings in Liberation and freedom Liberation from the diet mentality you learn how to eat imbalance for every occasion mindful eating frees us from the diet mentality or Obsession like I ate five cookies already so I may as well finish the whole pack and tomorrow I will start a new diet or I will fast or just eat healthy whatever that healthy means or maybe you are already in the middle of a diet and you have a break day to eat what you want so you spend the whole day eating whatever you've been craving during the past few weeks and thinking that tomorrow I'll go back to the deprivation really how much would you eat from your favorite cookies if you know that you can eat it tomorrow and the day after and to give you heads up you will learn how to enjoy and get satisfied from eating few bites rather than the whole pack with mindful eating you stop seeing food as poison or categorize food as bad food and good food when you're aware of your hunger taste preferences and what you would like to eat at the moment you can enjoy your favorite food when you're in tune with your body cues you don't really have to eat the full bucket of ice cream or the full large pizza to feel satisfied establishing a mindful eating practice and moving away from the diet mentality is really liberating but cultivating such a practice in our fast-paced society can be challenging it requires an intentional shift from using external guidance about what when and how much to eat what size your body should be what the bathroom scale should read to internal guidance using your taste buds your hunger fullness and satiety cues in order to achieve an awareness of your internal guidance a daily formal mindfulness practice is essential and there are many types of formal meditation practices that we will learn in this course each one is to help you achieve a certain type of awareness and lastly the attitudes with which we undertake the practice of paying attention is crucial we approach mindful eating the same way we approach mindfulness with the attitudes of curiosity openness non-judgment and compassion and this helps transition from an external to a more internal guidance system so mindful eating is eating while we are just eating without doing anything else in mindful eating we use all our senses while we're eating sight sound smell touch and taste we use physical hunger fullness and satiety cues and we acknowledge our responses to food mindful eating brings awareness to the positive qualities of food and we will dig deeper into all of this as we move through the course I will see you in the next lesson to learn about the attitudinal foundations of mindfulness and mindful eating