An Intimate Experience of Eating: Mindful Eating

Eating has never been more complicated throughout human history than it is today.

Hundreds of diet lists are circulating around. A food that is said to be ‘very healthy and should be eaten 3-4 times a week’ is cursed four or five years later.

It happens that each of our friends, whom we invite to dinner with the desire to crown it with a pleasant conversation, has a different diet; some are gluten-free, some do not consume dairy products, some are ketogenic, some are Avurvedic. Everyone plays a different tune…

Regardless of our diet, many of us describe eating as one of the greatest pleasures we get from life.

While we live in a fit body and in a healthy way, we want our mouths to be always festive.

Our relationship with food is much deeper, vital and complex than it seems.

When we open our eyes to this world, we are able to survive thanks to someone/someones feeding us. When we are hungry, feeding as much as we need is perhaps the first contact we establish with the world. Experts working on attachment theories say that the physical and mental system of a baby who is fed when hungry without being kept waiting too long (without being made to cry) internalises the following without realising it:

– This life gives me my most basic need without any problems.
– Life is looking after me.
– I am safe.

And it is said that the tiny nervous systems of babies who have to cry a lot when they are hungry so that their hunger is recognised, come to this conclusion on their own:

– Let’s not try so hard to get my needs recognised.

Or:

– No matter what I do, my needs are not seen/not recognised.

Sometimes, in infancy and early childhood, crying caused by various reasons is soothed by adults with tempting foods such as sugar, sweets and chocolate, which tells the system that:

– Eating, sweetening the mouth, suppresses and forgets all kinds of worries and troubles.

The food habits of the family we are born into, the way they eat, the table culture, the relationship they establish with food affect us deeply. Therefore, eating is not only limited to what we eat; at the same time, the relationship we establish with food sometimes and even most of the time determines the relationship we establish with life; it is quite decisive in our coping strategies with life. Therefore, when we ask ourselves the following questions, we can get closer to the blind spots of our personality not only in terms of eating habits but also in a more general sense:

– What does eating really mean to me?
– What is my relationship with food?
– Do our eating habits serve me? Or is it a process over which I have no control, where I lose myself and then feel guilty?

Mindfulness as a tool

The mindfulness approach is a toolbox with great possibilities for understanding our relationship with food.

Mindfulness, which means ‘directing attention to the present moment with a conscious choice, open awareness, a non-judgemental attitude and a compassionate approach’, has the power to show us our relationship habits with food in a transparent way.

How? Let’s take a look together.

Mindfulness for eating crises:

Diets tell us what to eat and what not to eat. There may be some sanctions here, the diet school we follow may upset our eating habits until that day or may not suit our taste at all. Mindfulness, on the other hand, makes the emotional dimension of our eating habits visible to us rather than what we eat.

For example, you complain about eating too much, especially snacking after dinner makes you feel very guilty because it can easily turn into weight gain. But every evening after 9 o’clock you can’t help yourself and indulge in one junk food after another.

To end this spiral, you need willpower, of course, but you also need to focus your attention on yourself, your strong desire to eat and the thoughts going through your mind.

Let’s say you get up from dinner. You sit in front of the television. You want to keep your mouth open and continue eating something. At this point, instead of going to the kitchen, use Mindfulness tools… Turn your attention to yourself. Look at the thoughts going through your mind without judgement, what are they telling you?

– ‘Come on, get up and cut yourself some cheese from the kitchen’?

Or:

– ‘Order a nice tiramusu so that you can enjoy yourself in the evening’?

You may have said: ‘Well, tiramusu is very calorific, why do you need it at night?’ and the voice in your head answered you like this:

-‘ You’ve worked like crazy all day, so what’s wrong with rewarding yourself a little?’

Maybe this discussion goes on and on and ends with the order being placed. In the morning, the guilt feelings come… Mindfulness teaches us to calmly watch the thoughts going through our head and the sensations in our body while all this conversation is taking place in our mind.

For example, how do we convince ourselves to eat? How do we express our need for food to ourselves? How do we feel after eating that thing?

When we calmly pay attention to what is going through our minds and apply this method for a while instead of imposing harsh rules on ourselves, we will have learnt the way we persuade ourselves very well. Such a follow-up can lead to profound behavioural changes after a while.

Mindfulness for staying in the feelings after eating

When we aim to adopt healthy eating habits, we focus all our attention on the food we eat. However, it is very important to look at our bodily feelings and mental processes about what we eat after eating in order to acquire the habits we want.

Let’s say you want to reduce your portions, but once you start eating, you can never stop. Don’t spend all your energy here to stop yourself from eating too much. You know what to do? After you finish eating, bring your attention to your stomach.

How is your stomach?
Is it uncomfortably full?
Do you feel any physical discomfort?
Or maybe your stomach is just as full as it should be, you have a satisfying feeling inside.
But what about your physical energy?
Even though your stomach is full, does your mind keep telling you, ‘Eat some more’?
A diet that is in harmony with our body, nutrients and the appropriate portion ratio we need do not bother us at all and energise us. Physical states such as feeling bloated after a meal, heartburn, low energy, sleep deprivation, etc. tell us:

-‘Something is not right with the way I am being fed’.

We usually pay attention to what we crave, what we want to eat. However, when we see how what we eat affects us physically, this awareness will affect our next eating experiment. Here, when you keep your attention on your stomach, on the sensations of your stomach, your stomach will talk to you very well.

Mindfulness for Before and After experience

The first article was titled ‘Mindfulness for food crises’ and the second article was ‘Mindfulness for staying in the feelings after eating’. That is, before and after eating. Eating is a momentary thing, and your state before and after eating will show you your true pattern of your eating habits.

Observe your feelings before eating, your behaviour while eating, and your emotions and bodily sensations after eating, without judgement or comment. During this process, behave as you feel for a while.

For example, if you have a habit of eating late at night, how do you feel when you wake up in the morning after giving in to that insistent voice ‘eat something’? How is your physical energy? Do you empty the fridge at midnight?

Let go of your inner voice that says ‘you’ve eaten too many calories again’, bring your attention to your stomach the next morning and experience the discomfort in your stomach. This experience will perhaps tell you during the next night’s eating crises:

-Don’t eat now, you will feel terrible in the morning!

Mindfulness for slowing down

Many of us live our days by rote. While we are doing something physically, we are thinking and planning other things mentally. The teaching of mindfulness advises us to give our full attention to what we are doing.

In other words:
When eating, just eat,
Smelling the food,
Seeing the food,
Chewing the food beautifully, feeling it, slowly chewing it, is exactly turning eating into a Mindfulness experience.

There is a huge difference between eating fast in front of the television and eating as an experience. When we slow down our eating speed, our relationship with food will change automatically.