Mindful Eating: A Powerful Tool for Managing Blood Sugar, Blood Pressure, and Weight

In this article:

• Mindful eating can bring joy to eating and strengthen a positive relationship with food. 
• Eating mindfully may support weight management and health goals while supporting health and weight management goals. 
• Eat more slowly to give your brain a chance to realize you’re full without overeating. It takes about 20 minutes for your brain to recognize fullness. 
• Asking yourself if you’re hungry before you start eating can help get you in tune with hunger cues and reasons for eating.
• Use sensory dining as a tool that engages your senses and makes eating more pleasurable. 
• Lark is available 24/7 to support your health and weight loss goals with or without GLP-1 medications so you can establish healthy habits for lifelong change. 

How is your relationship with food? Is food your friend, your foe, or something else?

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For many people who are focused on managing weight or living healthy, it can feel like food gets in the way of goals. We’re used to hearing about what we shouldn’t eat, or that specific foods can drive up weight, blood sugar, or blood sugar. But it’s possible to turn around a relationship with food. 

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Mindful eating is a way of eating that can support a more positive relationship with food. Mindful eating shifts focus away from specific meal plans and carbohydrate counts. The emphasis with mindful eating is on noticing your food and how it affects your body. Over time, people who eat more mindfully can enjoy food more, make healthier choices more easily, and feel more satisfied naturally. An article in the journal Diabetes Spectrum explains that mindful eating can help with weight management

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Here’s a basic guide on how to approach eating in mindful ways, with goals of enjoying food more, making better nutrition choices for your body, and reducing guilty feelings. Over time, practicing mindful eating can help you respond appropriately to hunger signals and make choices that support healthier blood sugar and blood pressure responses. Try these simple tips!

Try a Five-Sense Check-In

Mindful eating includes noticing the eating experience, but there can be a lot of distractions in today’s world. Many people eat while using their phones, working at a computer, watching television, or driving somewhere. 

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To tune in, try taking a sensory scan every time you plan to eat. Use all of your five senses, starting before you even sit down to eat. 

• Sight: What does the eating environment look like? Are there paintings on walls, tables filled with people, a window, or a tree nearby? What colors and shapes can you see on your plate and on the table? Notice bright green broccoli, dull brown meat, or shiny glints of glasses. 
• Smell: How does your food smell? What other scents can you detect, such as the smell of coffee, or other people’s food, or someone’s perfume?
• Sound: Can you hear people talking, music playing, food sizzling as it cooks, or the clink of ice in your glass? 
• Touch: Is the food hot, cold, soft, crunchy, dry, or sticky? Can you feel a chair against the backs of your legs? Are your feet against the ground? Is there a draft or a breeze on your skin? 
• Taste: What tastes are in your mouth? Do you have food that is spicy, sour, sweet, salty, or bitter? 

The idea here is to notice. It’s not to judge what you notice as good or bad. Just observe and accept.

Slow Down Your Eating

Eating more slowly can help you eat more mindfully. It can also help you be more satisfied with less food - and that’s a recipe for weight loss. When you eat, your full stomach triggers signals to tell your brain that you’re full. 

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The key here is that it takes about 20 minutes for those fullness signals to reach your brain. If you eat quickly, you might eat more food than you need before 20 minutes are up and your brain says you’re full. If you eat more slowly, you might feel full before you’ve eaten much food. That’s why eating more slowly can help you control your weight more easily. 

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Here are tips for eating more slowly. 

• Focus on enjoying each bite. Use your five senses to notice the food throughout your meal. 
• Chew each bite thoroughly. When you first start practicing, it can help to count 20 or 30 chews per bite.
• Put down your fork or spoon between each bite. 
• Engage with anyone else at your table. Talk and listen with great attention. 

For many people, engaging with a phone or another device while eating can lead to quicker eating with less enjoyment. The result can be eating more before you feel full and satisfied. 

Eat for Physiological Hunger

Why do you eat? The obvious answer may be that you eat because you’re hungry, or your body needs food. That’s often the best reason to eat, but it’s not the only reason why people eat. Other reasons can include stress, other emotional triggers, cravings, habits, social reasons, or boredom. Regularly eating for reasons aside from being hungry can lead to weight gain and other health concerns.

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When you reach for food, ask yourself why you are planning to eat. If it turns out that you’re eating for reasons that aren’t related to having physiological hunger, look for a more appropriate action than eating. For example, if you’re bored, try an activity. If you’re stressed, consider taking a walk to think about what’s stressing you out. 

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Checking in with yourself each time before you eat can help you learn to distinguish between physiological, or true, hunger, and “head’ hunger, or a desire for food stemming from other reasons. 

Check in with Your Hunger and Fullness Cues

How do you know if you are hungry or full? Some people are already in tune with their hunger and fullness cues. They seem to know when to start eating, and when to stop eating. Other people can work on tuning into their hunger and fullness cues. 

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Noticing hunger and fullness are part of mindful eating. You can work on tuning into your hunger cues by taking just a few seconds before and during meals. Check in with yourself often to ask how hungry you are. A meal or snack should start when you are moderately hungry, but not starving.

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Once you start eating, check in every few minutes to ask yourself how full you are. It’s good to stop eating when you’re starting to get full, but long before you feel stuffed. With practice, you can learn to recognize your body’s signals. 

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Here is more information about tuning into hunger cues. 

Mindful Eating to Manage Cravings

Cravings are strong desires for specific foods or types of foods. Common cravings include starchy foods like pasta, bread, and potatoes, sugary foods like ice cream and chocolate, and salty or fatty foods like chips and other snack foods. 

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Strong or frequent cravings can lead to overeating and less healthy choices, causing weight gain or increased blood sugar or blood pressure. Mindful eating can be a tool to help manage cravings and prevent them from being as harmful. Here’s why. 

Cravings are usually not due to biological hunger. They’re usually the result of other factors like boredom or stress. Mindful eating can help you recognize if a craving is a result of something besides hunger. 

With mindful eating, you take care to notice the textures, colors, and scents of your food. You might start to notice and appreciate a wider variety of characteristics, like the crunch and sweetness of carrot, or the earthiness and spice of a beet with cumin. These observations can eventually guide you towards more nutritious choices.

Mindful eating can help you notice connections between what you eat and how you feel. Often, foods that people eat to satisfy cravings lead to feeling heavy or tired soon afterwards. 

If you have a craving, consider some alternatives to eating foods that your body doesn’t need.

• Drink a glass of ice water
• Delay eating for 5 to 10 minutes while you check email or go outside
• Go for a walk
• Phone a friend
• Prepare a healthy, low-calorie snack like carrot sticks or celery, sit down, and enjoy it

Mayo Clinic has more tips on cravings. 

Lark Can Help

Eating mindfully can be good for health and weight loss, and Lark can help. Your Lark coach is available 24/7 for encouragement, nutrition and physical activity coaching, and habit tracking. Lark can help you make healthy choices and establish habits that fit into your lifestyle so you can lose weight and keep it off with or without GLP-1 medications. 

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Click here to see if you may be eligible to join Lark today!

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