Have you ever been on a diet and had a hard time sticking to it? Maybe you’ve tried cutting out food groups or restricting calories, but you’re having trouble maintaining and meeting your goals. Mindful nutrition could be the answer.
Dr. Romi Ran is a clinical psychologist specializing in food, nutrition and body image who advocates a compassionate approach to eating Bite-Size Peace: Change the Way You Eat, Accept Your Body, Transform Your Life. Mindfulness is proven to help with mental health, and according to Ran, mindful eating can help fix your eating problems — in fact, it can completely change your relationship with food.
What is mindful eating?
“Mindful eating is about tuning into your body,” says Ran. “When you’re hungry, you eat and when you’re full, you stop eating.” Sounds simple, right? But you’ll have to do some work to get to that point.
“This is an approach to eating that emphasizes being fully mindful throughout the eating experience, without any judgment, guilt or evaluation,” says Ran. “Noticing the colors, smells, textures, tastes, temperatures, and even the sounds it makes as we chew it.”
It’s not just the natural eating process that you need to know. “It’s the whole relationship we have with food,” says Ran. “You learn to distinguish physical hunger from emotional cravings and wanting to eat because you’re bored or stressed, for example.”
Cultivating this approach can help avoid slipping into yo-yo dieting, where the deprivation and malnutrition of restrictive diets can lead to overeating, either at the end of a diet or if you fall off the wagon.
What’s the secret to mindful eating?
“Most important of all is learning to make that connection with your body’s innate wisdom,” says Rann. “Your body knows what, how much and when to eat. Instead of relying on external dietary rules, social norms, or even your thoughts, learn how to listen to and trust your body’s signals. If you do this, you will find that it will tell you what is needed.’
Ran shares an example. If it’s 11 o’clock and you’re hungry, but lunch time is usually at 1 o’clock, it’s okay to eat now. The idea is to eat when you’re hungry, choose foods that nourish you and make you feel good, and then stop when you’re full, even if that means leaving food on your plate.
the book of ran, Bite-Sized Peace contains exercises to help you listen to your body’s signals. It suggests the development of a hunger scale, where for example:
- Five is neutral, not hungry or distracted by food.
- Four starts to get hungry or feel like a snack.
- Three is craving for certain food, losing focus on other activities.
- Two is irritable, stomach growls, craves expensive dishes.
- One is when you will eat anything, you start panicking to get food.
- Zero is feeling dizzy, nauseous or passed out from hunger and almost walking away from eating.
Ran suggests taking a few weeks to tune into your hunger on different levels and learn what hunger cues look like for you. This enables you to identify the perfect level of hunger when eating is most satisfying and enjoyable and when you are least likely to overeat.
“Mindful eating can help you become aware of how different foods will affect your mood, how they will affect your energy levels, and how they can make you feel physically, mentally, and emotionally,” says Ran.
“Your whole relationship with food, your body, and food will change if you really nurture that connection with your body’s innate wisdom and let it guide you instead of following external cues,” says Ran.
Will I lose weight?
“The best approach is to set goals based on value rather than goals,” says Ran. A goal-based goal might be to lose 15 pounds, for example. “This is driven by fear and the thought that you’re not good enough, that you need to change yourself.” A value-based approach on the other hand would be something like, “I want to start feeding my body better.”
“Now that’s compassionate, that’s coming from a place of love, of feeling worthy,” Ran says. “It says ‘I deserve to eat good, nutritious food that makes my body feel good and fills me up.’ The emphasis is completely different. One is about change and the other is about being.”
You may well find that you lose weight with this approach. But by shifting your focus from losing weight to improving your health and well-being, combined with kindness and self-acceptance, you may also find that you no longer care about the number on the scale because your whole perspective has changed for the better.
Dr Romi Ran is a clinical psychologist, a protected title in the UK that requires her to be registered with the Health & Care Professions Council. He is also a member of British Psychological Society. She earned a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Oxford and has worked as a research coordinator in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.
