Mindful eating, another lifestyle which derived from another foreign culture and custom, mean for improving the quality of life, making a good life-cycle, and employing healthy-living behavior.
For some reasons, people nowadays tend to find many ancient ways from many different cultures in order to perform a healthy lifestyle.
‘To be seen as healthy as possible’ seems like a new movement for the millennial. And now, what is so special about this mindful eating thing? Also think about the benefits exercise recommendation, okay?
The mindful eating is derived from a psychological movement called as Mindfulness.
It is intended to be some kind of mental processes development: deliberately bringing one’s consciousness to fully-experiencing the present moment without any judgment and losing focus to other things.
Thus, the mindful eating means doing all of those psychological deliberations while consuming any food or drink.
By doing these kind of practices, hopefully, we can reset out body clock and implement a better life cycle.
It can be done since mindfulness will always drive us to execute all of the activities in a complete 100% effort – eliminating the unnecessary redundancy by increasing the activity ‘effectiveness’.
Even when you think about the benefits of eating chocolate cake for breakfast, this thing is quite new, isn’t it?
And without any further ado, and it is exactly not mentioning about benefits of eating raw coconut, here are five health benefits of mindful eating:
1. Inhibit the exaggerated food consumption.
When we talk about healthy eating, mostly we will think about health benefits of eating green salad at night or something.
But actually, the most wanted thing when we are implementing the mindful eating is to avoid excessive eating.
Sometimes people still eat even though they don’t feel hungry. In other cases, people eat to console some condition like when they feel bored, sad, stressed, or often just for ‘accompanying’ their activity such as eating pop-corn while in the cinema.
By doing the mindfulness we can deploy the total focus to the present moment, especially while eating, so we can fully taste the cuisine and maximizing our lust toward food. It may keep our stomach full for longer period.
2. Resetting the body-clock.
All of your body part work within a certain life schedule. The ‘biological rhythm’, at least that’s what experts said.
That life cycle is the major ‘controller’ of your whole body programming like when your body want to sleep, thus you start drowsy; when your body want to eat, hence you feel starving; etc.
By the mindfulness you can start to reset those programming system into the way that you feel proper.
Specifically when we talk about the mindful eating, that means you try to reconcile the body rhythm which has correlation with eating schedule.
3. Mindful eating >< mental well-being.
Although what you only care about is health benefits of eating Momos, some of the researchers believed that there are some relationships between the mindful eating behaviors with a good mental well-being.
Because of that, many researches wanted to find out whether there were any correlations between them.
The research were involving 309 participants, consisted of men and women from across the world.
And the result was astonishing! The research showed there are indeed positive correlations. So, mindful eating leads you to develop a mental well-being.
4. Such a diet method.
Some research also had been conducted in order to measure the impact of mindful eating with eating disorder and obesity, especially which occurred in men.
As the participants, there were ten men which considered obesity. For some time period, they got the mindful eating as a treatment.
By the end of the research, the result showed that there were significant decreases in each participant weight, dis-inhibition & binge eating, observed stress and depression, physical symptoms, negative also C-reactive protein. What a great way of diet!
5. Lead you to a healthy eating habit.
Again, there is another study which concerning about the mindful eating. For this one, the research was meant to find out the relationship between mindful eating with healthier eating habit.
The researchers chose the experiment as the method to simulate the mindful eating upon the participant.
And the result was amazing: it gave a strong proof that mindful eating greatly encouraged healthy eating behavior.
But, some of you, who want to try this eating pattern as a diet, maybe still wonder about the methodology of mindful eating as a diet method. Therefore, here are some tips for doing mindful eating:
- Make sure you always focus to the present moment i.e. the moment when you are eating. Don’t get distracted by anything and also left your judgment behind.
- You need to sit down, slow down, savor the food, and tastes it completely. It will improve the quality of your mindful eating.
- Be focus and more focus to your tasting sense, each time you are consuming something, like: the taste, texture, and smell of the cuisine.
- Make sure that you always sit down when eating and chew your food carefully .
- Do not put yourself to hard. Eat when you still need it, but stop, before your stomach is full.
Those are five health benefits of mindful eating which can add some insight for you.
Sources:
Dalen, J., Smith, B. W., Shelley, B. M., Sloan, A. L., Leahigh, L., & Begay, D. (2010). Pilot study: Mindful Eating and Living (MEAL): weight, eating behavior, and psychological outcomes associated with a mindfulness-based intervention for people with obesity. Complementary therapies in medicine, 18(6), 260-264.
Jordan, C. H., Wang, W., Donatoni, L., & Meier, B. P. (2014). Mindful eating: Trait and state mindfulness predict healthier eating behavior. Personality and Individual differences, 68, 107-111.
Khan, Z., & Zadeh, Z. F. (2014). Mindful eating and it’s relationship with mental well-being. Procedia Soc. Behav. Sci, 159, 69-73.