8 Quick Ayurvedic Mindful Eating Practices for Weight Loss

What is Mindful Eating?

The mindful eating technique is a conscious approach that emphasises present-moment awareness and non-judgemental observation of the entire eating experience. 

You are already practising mindful eating if you AVOID the following.

• Distractions - Eating while multitasking (Watching TV, Working )
• Rushing - Quickly taking a bite without savouring the taste or texture
• Emotional Eating - Eating to cope with your stress or boredom
• Automatic Pilot - Eating without being hungry or when you are full.

Read on to learn some amazing mindful healthy eating tips.

How to Practise Mindful Eating Techniques?

The only major part you have to take care of in order to practise mindful eating is checking if you have a healthier relationship with food. Mindful eating encourages a shift in focus towards eating. Some of the points you can check for are;

• Awareness - Be present when you eat. Touch the food and focus on the sensations of eating, including taste, smell, texture and how the food affects your body.
• Non-Judgmental Observation - You must acknowledge your thoughts and emotions without judgment as you eat, allowing yourself to experience the act of eating.
• Internal Cues - Understanding your hunger and satiety signals very well to help you guide your eating decisions.

Benefits of Practising Mindful Eating

Mindful eating has a multitude of benefits that just help you manage weight loss. But, this blog is limited to making you understand how mindful eating can help you manage your weight.

1. Reduces Overeating

When you pay attention to details and concentrate on slowing down, you recognise your hunger signals. This awareness lets you stop eating when comfortably satisfied, naturally stopping you from overeating.

2. Improves Your Food Choices

When you are mindful about the food you consume, you also start learning how certain food items affect your body and mood. This gives you the empowerment to make healthy choices, further nourishing your body and promoting satiety.

3. Better Digestion 

Mindful eating can reduce your stress levels. This can help  your gut absorb the nutrients in the food well and you will have an improved digestion and metabolism.

4. Improved Portion Control

When you are aware of your hunger signals, you naturally adjust portion sizes based on your internal needs, preventing overconsumption.

5. Reduced Emotional Eating

When you are mindful of your internal hunger signals and the food is good for you, you naturally tend to reduce emotional eating. You start to distinguish between physical hunger and emotional cues that trigger the desire to eat. 

Why Is Overcoming Emotional Eating Important for Weight Loss?

To answer this, you mus know how how your emotion is connected with your eating habits.

Emotional eating is a natural tendency to eat in response to emotions. As understood otherwise, emotional eating is not a separate eating disorder, but an eating behaviour. This behaviour is influenced by stress, emotions and individual feelings in relation to eating.

Research papers suggest that lack of emotional regulation and a high level of negative emotions are the key factors of obesity. Thus, we can say that the relation between obesity and emotional factors is bi-directional.

Emotional eating complicates weight management for several reasons, such as;

1. Mindless Consumption : 

Eating becomes mindless when someone tries to cope hard with emotions. This may lead to overconsumption.

2. Complicates Management : 

Emotional eating creates a pattern of unhealthy eating. This temporary comfort further leads to guilt and shame, which complicates the negative emotions.

3. Health Consequences : 

In the long run, emotional eating contributes to weight gain and increased risk of chronic diseases like heart conditions.

Adopt Mindfulness Identifying Triggers and Managing Emotional Eating

Mindfulness is one of the core factors that can help you manage your emotional eating. If you are already reading this article this far, congratulations, you have already crossed the first step to being mindful of your health needs.

Mindfulness helps in ;

• Identifying Triggers - Practices like journalling to identify patterns and emotional triggers help.
• Mindful Pausing - Before reaching out for some food, pause and acknowledge your emotions. As yourself if you are truly hungry or if it is just an urge to eat.
• Healthy Coping Mechanisms - Choosing coping mechanisms like spending time in nature, exercising or working on creative activities will help you choose healthier options.
• Mindful Eating Practices - Adding mindful eating will help you slow down and savour each bite of food, which will promote awareness of what you are eating.

Different Mindful Eating Techniques

Try these expert-recommended mindful eating techniques to reach your health goals.

1. Try a Mindful Check-in before Eating

Ask yourself - How hungry am I? How do I feel physically and emotionally? This thoughtful process will bring you back to the present.  

2. Start Your Meal with a Gratitude Practice

Even if you do not practise saying prayers before having food, just take a moment to appreciate and be grateful for the food in front of you. Think of your food as something that will nourish you. 

3. Savour Each Bite of Your Meal

Remember when you were a kid and you were asked to count the number of times you chewed your food? Yes, that is exactly what you must repeat again. When you chew your food slowly, your stomach gets time to send signals to your brain that you are full. Eating at a faster pace will make you end up overeating.

4. Minimise Distractions during Meals

Try to stay present during your meals. It's easy to overeat when you're distracted. Instead of eating in front of the television or scrolling on your phone, try to eat without distractions, which helps keep your focus on the experience of eating. It's mealtime. We can multitask later!

5. Tune into Your Senses as You Eat

Engage all five of your senses while eating. See the colour of your food, smell the aroma, taste the flavours, feel the textures and listen to your hunger cues. Focusing on how your food interacts with your senses keeps you in the present moment, which also tunes you into your body.

6. Take a Mindful Pause between Bites When You're Eating

Engaging in the present moment as you eat includes the moments when you're not actively chewing. Put down your utensil between bites to create a pause. Take a breath, and check in with your hunger and fullness cues. If you're still hungry, take another bite, chew, and repeat until you're full.

7. Listen to Your Body's Hunger and Fullness Signals

Mindful eating is about listening to your body. So, make a conscious effort to tune into those hunger signals to understand when you need to eat and pay attention to when you start feeling full to avoid overeating.

8. Choose Nourishing Foods

Make it a habit to look for ingredients that nourish your body and are satisfying at the same time. Adding your favourite fruits and vegetables is a place to start this. Grab a fruit whenever you feel food cravings. This will grow your healthy eating habits.

9. Reflect on the Way You Think and Feel When You're Eating

After your meal, take a moment to reflect and ask yourself the following questions: How do I feel? Was the meal satisfying? Do I want more? This reflection can provide valuable insights for your mindful eating journey.

10. Acknowledge and Make Space for Your Cravings

Cravings can come and go. It's you who must recognise if those cravings are emotional or physical hunger. When you are mindful, you can pause and think about what you are dealing with. It's best to quit the habit of eating when you are stressed, anxious, feeling sad or bored. Avoiding emotional eating is one of the first steps towards mindful eating practices for weight management.

Ayurvedic Mindful Eating for Weight Loss

Ayurvedic experts emphasise on eight important mindful eating practices for weight loss and overall well-being.

1. Prakriti / Nature of Food

Food has a natural quality. For example, some foods are heavy to digest, and some are light to digest. Knowing and understanding this will allow you to choose food items according to your digestion capacity.

2. Karana/ Method of Processing the Foods

You must transform the food substances by cooking, baking or boiling and turn it into something that your body can digest and metabolise. This mindful method of transforming food changes the way your body reacts to the food. 

3. Samyoga/ Combination of Food Substances

Knowing which food to combine with what helps your body metabolise the food without producing toxic byproducts. 

4. Raashi/ Quantity of Food

Knowing how much food you must consume depends upon each individual. More than that, you must know what proportions of food you must consume at a time to meet your metabolic needs and energy.

5. Desha / Place Where the Food Items are Grown

Knowing the place or region of cultivation is considered important because the quality of land also gets inherited into your food items. It's best if you have your own kitchen garden for this. If not, its always wise to choose food items seasonally, so that your inner body changes according to the natural changes in the environment.

6. Kaala / Time of Consumption of Food

Your time of food consumption must reflect your appetite, digestion and excretion. If all these are balanced, then your metabolic health, including your weight management, will work well. 

Knowing your hunger and satiety signals plays an important role in your weight loss journey.

7. Upayoga Samstha/ Rules and Regulations for Consuming Food

Knowing when to take food is an art of understanding your individual body. Being mindful of proper digestion signals is the first step you can take towards your weight loss journey.

Some of the body signals of your hunger calls are - clean belching, proper evacuation of stools, gas and urine, lightness of body, feeling hungry at the right intervals and feeling thirsty.

8. Upbhokta/ Knowing Your Own Body

Your body behaviour changes from your friend's due to the place you are born, the environment you live in or the type of food items you are used to eating for a long time.  So making changes in your habits depends on your body type and environment. 

Your ayurvedic health expert will guide you through your mindful eating practices for weight management and satiety by keeping in mind the above rules of taking food. Its not always about counting calories and essential nutrients in your food.

To start with, let's make it easier for you to adapt to this weight loss journey.

Mindful Eating for Weight Loss - Starting Your Journey

First and foremost, you can checklist the following two goals.

• Making Healthier Food Choices
• Curbing Unhealthy Cravings

Let's see how!

1. Steps to Make Healthier Food Choices;

• Reduce Emotional Eating
• Pay attention to the food you consume
• Adopt portion control 

2. Steps to Curb Unhealthy Cravings

• Understand your cravings and segregate your choices.
• Make notes of your cravings and delay your reflex impulses the next time.
• Mindfully choose healthier options.

So, how do these steps help? Slowly practising mindful eating cultivates a more conscious and intuitive relationship with food.  This makes you more aware and lets you make healthy choices that will support your metabolic health, ultimately helping you lose weight.

“Aim to create a healthy relationship with your food and see yourself succeeding in no time", says Dr. Israa Ismail, Senior Ayurveda Consultant at Nirva.

The Final Takeaway!

Mindful eating doesn't have as many rules and regulations as you can see from the article. It's all about knowing your body, recognising your hunger and satiety signals, and enjoying the food you eat. Interact with your inner self when you nourish it; that is the motto of mindful eating practices.