Mindful Eating Checklist

Mindful eating is being aware. Instead of spending your mealtime checking Facebook, texting or watching TV, you concentrate on the act of eating.

The brain and body health benefits of mindful eating can truly boost your health and well-being.

The following mindful eating tips can help you overcome emotional eating, and uncover unhealthy eating patterns and behaviors.

☐ When you are not mindful of how you eat, your odds of developing cancer, diabetes, and heart disease, as well as mental and physical health problems, significantly increase.

☐ When you eat highly processed food, much of it contains chemicals that create a pleasure response in your brain. This is how you become addicted to junk food.

☐ The process triggered by sugar, salt, and other additives and chemicals in highly processed food creates the same chemical reaction that makes drug addicts crave cocaine and heroin.

☐ Be mindful of your emotions before you eat. It could be that you are eating to suppress some emotion or feeling you need to face, rather than true hunger.

☐ If you think you are hungry, drink a 12 to 16-ounce glass of water and wait 10 to 15 minutes. Many times, this exposes false hunger.

☐ Chew slowly, savoring every bite and the texture of your food. How does your food look and smell? How did it feel in your hands when you were preparing it? Be conscious of every step of the eating process.

☐ The 6 questions you should ask yourself before you eat are why, when, what, how, how much, and where. Answering these questions honestly can help you decide if you are physically or emotionally hungry, and keep you eating healthy as opposed to unhealthy food.

☐ Think about what had to happen for your food to arrive on your plate. Being aware and conscious of safe, clean, and humane food manufacturing processes is a big part of mindful eating.

☐ Drink lots of water and herbal tea all day long.

☐ Eat more "real food", and less processed food. When you eat foods as close to their natural state, you regulate your mental and physical states of being and become more mindful of nutrition.

☐ Practice gratitude. When you take time to be thankful for the food you have, you are practicing conscious awareness of your eating behaviors.

Mindful Questions: Stop Emotional Eating For Good

☐ Ask yourself simply, "Why am I eating?"

Be honest with your answer.

Emotional eating (or stress eating) is using food to make yourself feel better- eating to satisfy emotional needs, rather than to satisfy physical hunger (www.helpguide.org)

☐ Ask yourself what exactly it is that you are eating.

This is an easy question to answer if you are about to eat a banana, a broiled piece of fish, and other foods found in nature.

It is sometimes virtually impossible to answer that question when you try to decipher exactly what makes up highly processed food.

☐ Ask yourself how you will feel after you eat?

You have probably had regrets and frustration after eating unhealthy junk food before.

Being honest with yourself about how you know a particular food will make you feel is important.

☐ Ask yourself, "How will this food help my long-term health?"

If you are trying to lose weight, or improve your health and wellbeing in some other way, thinking long-term can help you avoid the short-term effects of bad eating habits.

☐ Ask yourself if a smaller portion would suffice.

This gets you thinking about the core reason for your eating.

There's nothing wrong with eating a brownie or piece of cake every now and then, but do you really need 6 pieces or more?

☐ Ask yourself, "Am I about to binge on junk food as a way to punish myself?"

Turning to the food you know is not good for you is one way you may be punishing yourself for some perceived mistake or failure.

When eating is your primary emotional coping mechanism-when your first impulse is to eat whenever you’re stressed, upset, angry, lonely, exhausted, or bored-you will get stuck in an unhealthy cycle (www.helpguide.org).

Real Hunger Vs. Emotional Hunger and What it Means to Healthy Eating

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome when eating healthy is learning how to properly manage hunger.

If you can learn to manage your hunger properly, then you are well on your way to healthy eating.

Real Hunger

Real hunger refers to the actual feelings of hunger that you experience when your body truly needs food.

Real hunger refers to the feelings you get when you absolutely need food.

When you are suffering from real hunger, you will know it. You will likely get sharp hunger cramps. Your mind will be consumed with getting food and nothing else, you won’t be able to concentrate on anything else.

Because of how easy it is to get food and how much food is available to us, very few people ever truly experience real hunger anymore unless they are purposely denying themselves food as part of a fad diet.

The most effective method for managing real hunger is to practice mindful eating. Mindful eating is basically a strategy that relies on smart portion control (to avoid overeating) combined with slow eating.

Believe it or not, slow eating actually does manage to satisfy your hunger more than scoffing down your food.

Applying mindful eating is easily the most effective way to curb your feelings of real hunger.

Emotional Hunger

Emotional hunger refers to instances where you may feel hungry but isn’t because your body is demanding food, instead it’s because your mind is making you think that you need food.

Your mind is definitely powerful enough to make you think that you are hungry, even when you really aren’t in desperate need of food.

There are a variety of factors that can result in emotional hunger. By far the most common cause is boredom.

When you get bored, you may turn to food to try and alleviate your boredom. You may mistake the feelings of boredom for feelings of hunger and assume that you need to eat to cure your hunger.

Another common cause of emotional hunger is a habit. When you eat your meals at the same time every day, you may find yourself getting “hungry” around that time, even though your body isn’t actually craving food.

There are some telltale signs that you are suffering from emotional hunger and not real hunger.

The first sign is if you have eaten recently (within the last few hours). It takes your body a while to digest food, so if you are feeling hungry after having eaten recently, then it is unlikely to be real hunger.

Another sign is if you are just sitting around doing nothing and suddenly start feeling hungry. That is a good sign that you are suffering from boredom-induced hunger.

Finally, if you truly want to tell if you are suffering from emotional hunger, drink a glass of cold ice water and see if the hunger subsides. If it does, it is emotional hunger and not real hunger.

Mindful Eating Vs. Mindless Eating

Mindful Eating

☐ Thinking about WHY you want to eat

☐ Eating meals at set times of the day

☐ Knowing the difference between physical hunger and head hunger

☐ Eating when noticing hunger signals from the body

☐ Eating foods based on how healthy they are

☐ Thinking about where your food comes from

☐ Listening to your body and stopping eating when full

☐ Feeling comfortable to stop when you're satisfied

☐ Taking time over your meal

☐ Focusing on your food when you eat

☐ Practicing self-care and wellness of mind, body and spirit

Mindless Eating

☐ Just eating without thinking about it

☐ Often eating foods at random times or skipping some meals

☐ Just eating whenever you "feel" like it

☐ Eating based on emotional feelings like stress, sadness or boredom

☐ Eating foods based on how comforting they feel

☐ Not thinking about where your food comes from

☐ Eating past the feeling of fullness

☐ Never being satisfied, or feeling compelled to clean your plate

☐ Eating food in a hurry

☐ Being distracted while you eat (e.g. watching TV)

☐ Constantly letting stress get the best of you

Mindful Eating: Healthy Food List

☐ Avoid –Sugar

Sugar is a health destroyer and should be avoided. Look for foods that list sugar as an ingredient, and avoid them.

Understand that food manufacturers list sugar under many ingredients that end in the suffix -ose, and this is just an underhanded way of trying to hide the presence of sugar.

Replace sugar with – Natural Sweeteners

There are naturally healthy sugars and other sweeteners in nature. Fruits contain healthy sugars, and they are accompanied by dietary fiber, minerals, and nutrients your body needs.

You may also replace refined sugar with crushed Stevia leaves, but avoid Stevia that comes in crystallized form, since there are often unhealthy additives present. Raw, organic honey is another natural sweetener.

☐ Avoid – Salt

Salt is not bad in and of itself. Your body actually needs salt. However, processed foods make it almost a guarantee that you are getting way too much salt to be healthy.

Replace salt with – Natural Herbs

Any natural herb, such as oregano, basil, rosemary, and others, provides healthy flavor. They have zero calories and zero carbs, and zero chance of jacking up your salt content to an unhealthy level.

☐ Avoid – Energy drinks, sodas, and retail fruit juices.

Aside from usually having criminally high levels of sugar, canned or bottled fruit juices, sodas, and energy drinks contain artificial colorings and other additives and toxins that are extremely bad for you.

Replace with – Coconut Water

Green tea, other herbal teas, water, and coconut water are healthy alternatives to sugar-filled, store-bought beverages. You can also make flavorful, nutritious juices and smoothies.

Just make sure the fruits and vegetables you use have not been frozen in a solution with sugar, salt, and other harmful ingredients.

☐ Avoid – Dairy milk

Dairy milk has been found to weaken bones rather than strengthen them and has been linked to higher than normal rates of cancer and heart disease.

Replace dairy milk with – Coconut milk

Coconut milk and almond milk are healthy alternatives to dairy milk. In many cases, they deliver more vitamin D than dairy milk and contain other nutrients your body requires.

Read your food labels, and avoid any coconut or almond milk with added sugar.

☐ Avoid – Highly processed foods

Highly processed foods and fast food, those that you usually purchase in a bag, can, box or wrapper, are almost never good for you.

Replace processed foods with – Plant-Based Foods

Eat predominantly fresh plant-based foods, fruits, nuts, berries, and vegetables. Eat them raw whenever you can, as close to their natural state as possible.

This way you get nutrients, vitamins, and minerals, instead of man-made chemicals toxins and poisons.

☐ Avoid – White Rice/White Flour

Simple grains and simple carbohydrates like white flour, pasta, and white rice. These foods have little to no nutrition, and your body converts them and stores them as fat.

Replace with – Whole Grains,

Foods like quinoa, barley, buckwheat, and brown rice.

You will also find that the healthy and versatile cauliflower can replace rice when ground down to a similar consistency, and cauliflower can also be used in place of potatoes in a lot of meals.