The holidays are here! Large gatherings, good food, football, and a side of family drama. Big meals are exciting, delicious, and also can feel overwhelming.
While feeling stuffed is a normal post-Thanksgiving dinner experience and totally allowed, you may decide this year that you want to avoid the food coma and bloating. (Either way – it’s totally up to you; there’s no right or wrong way to do Thanksgiving.)
If you want to experiment with a Thanksgiving meal without the post-meal discomfort, consider giving mindful eating a try.
Mindful eating means using your senses, both physical and emotional, to focus on your eating experience and enjoy your food. When you are more aware of your eating experiences, you can appreciate a good meal more than ever before.
Check out these five tips on how to eat mindfully:
Tip #1: Enjoy your food by paying attention to your senses.
It’s easy to eat a meal on autopilot without really tasting the food. The truth is, food is meant to be enjoyed!
Try tuning into your senses. How does the food taste? What flavors and textures are you experiencing? How does it smell? What does the food look like? Ask yourself a couple of these questions as you are eating.
Also pay attention to how the food you eat makes you feel. Does it bring you joy? Does it bring back good memories? Is the first bite as good as the last? Stay present and in the moment.
Tip #2: Listen to your body’s hunger and fullness cues.
Try to eat before you get “hangry”. A good time to eat is when you are hungry, but not starving. At the “gently hungry” stage, your stomach may feel a little empty and you feel ready to eat, but you don’t have hunger pains.
While eating notice when you start to feel comfortably satisfied rather than uncomfortably full. When you feel comfortably satisfied, your stomach feels full, but you don’t feel sick or uncomfortable.
Don’t feel the need to finish everything on your plate. It can be hard to ditch that “clean your plate” mentality, but try it once to see how you like it. If you are worried about wasting food, you can always pack it up and save it for later.
Tip #3: Limit distractions while eating.
In the age of smartphones, social media, and Netflix, it can be tempting to always be doing two things at once. Try putting the electronics away while eating.
This may be difficult at first, but it can be super beneficial. When you are focused on your eating experience without any outside distractions, you can really start to focus on how the meal makes you feel and start to tune in to your hunger and fullness cues.
Tip #4: Allow yourself to eat the foods you like.
Don’t deprive yourself of your cravings or your favorite food. Food has no moral value, meaning that there is no such thing as a “good” food or a “bad” food.
Holidays can involve some of your favorite foods and family recipes, and you don’t want to miss out on those.
It is perfectly okay to aim for a balanced, nutrient-dense diet, but it is important to not allow strict food rules to get in the way of the joy a good meal can bring you!
Allow yourself unconditional permission to enjoy the foods you like without feeling guilty.
Tip #5: Be kind to yourself.
Mindful eating is a journey! It can be very difficult at first and it really comes with practice. If you don’t practice mindful eating at every meal, that is okay. Give yourself some grace and remind yourself that you may be starting to learn an entirely different way of eating than you have ever done before.
Remember that the holidays are a time to enjoy your favorite foods and the people around you. By practicing mindful eating, you can start to enjoy them even more.