Phones down! How to eat mindfully

30th November 2020 | Alison Turner
Phones down! How to eat mindfully

While you’re reading this, what else are you doing? You might be scrolling through social media while you down a morning coffee on the commute to work, or squeezing in some internet time between emails over a rushed lunch break. Hey, we all do it. But these days our lives are so bombarded with external stimuli, we’re often too distracted to focus our attention on any one single task. And this includes our daily meals. But there are easy ways to break the habit. Here, an expert shares his top tips on how to eat mindfully.

We all eat at least three times a day, but often we’re barely paying attention to what we’re putting in our mouths. When you eat mindlessly – inhaling a late dinner over the TV news, or cramming in a rushed lunch between Zoom meetings, you’re not allowing your mind to register the proper cues that your body is trying to send you.

Mindfulness facilitator and performance coach Melo Calarco has done a lot of work in the corporate space, and is all too familiar with the sight of people eating mindlessly at work.

“A lot of people sit in front of their computer eating, and they’re not getting any cues,” he says. “They’re not getting the satisfaction cues that they’re full. You haven’t engaged with your food. You’re tapping away at an email, and then suddenly, your lunch is finished; you’ve barely noticed that you’ve eaten anything. Then you want more to get that reward.”

How to eat mindfully
Lunch at your desk again? It’ll be gone before you even notice it.

Attention, please

Calarco cites research that says if you eat in front of the computer, you get hungry 20 minutes later, because your brain hasn’t registered that you’ve eaten.

“Then you often crave carbs, a sweet kick, to satisfy your brain’s reward system,” he says.

Not paying attention to your body and to your meals can also lead to poor decision making. Eating on the run, and just grabbing whatever you can at the last minute, is likely to cause you to opt for convenience over nutrition.

“Thinking, ‘I’ll just grab something quickly to fill me up’ – that sort of eating on the run attitude; you’re not mindful of even taking the time to eat something healthy,” Calarco says,

This kind of mindless eating can become a habit, such as your afternoon pick-me-up of coffee and a muffin. When 3pm rolls around, you build an association that you need that hit. And often, once you grab that snack, you eat it while working at your desk or staring at your phone, without even really noticing what you’re consuming.

“You often see people in cafes, staring at a screen,” Calarco says. “We use our phone as company when we’re sitting alone. This teaches you to not engage with what you’re doing.”

Phones down! How to eat mindfully
Did you even taste that flat white? Your screen is distracting you from the simple pleasures of life.

How to eat mindfully

So what can you do to start being more mindful of your food? You don’t need to move to an ashram, or start chanting “om” before every meal. To eat mindfully is as simple as stopping.

“Like any mindfulness practice, eating mindfully is stopping what you’re doing and taking the time to focus on your food,” Calarco advises. “Pay attention to all your senses.”

Start by smelling the aroma of your food. This won’t just increase its appeal; it will also start your mouth producing enzymes, which aid digestion. Then chew your food. Taste the flavours and feel the textures. Embrace the whole experience that comes with eating.

“Sometimes I even close my eyes” Calarco admits. “I taste the flavours with my eyes closed to heighten that sensory awareness.”

If you’re cooking a meal for yourself or your family, try to resist the temptation to eat bits and pieces as you go. Enjoy the preparation of the food, and appreciate the fact that you have an abundance of nutritious food at your disposal. Wait until the meal is ready, and then sit down, without distractions, and focus solely on eating it.

Eat your meal slowly, and appreciate who prepared it, and who grew it
Twitter can wait: eat your meal slowly, and appreciate who prepared it, and who grew it.

A great first step

We’ve all heard about the benefits of mindfulness. But in our rushed and over-stimulated existence, it can feel impossible to incorporate it into daily life. But since you already have to eat every day, Calarco says eating is the perfect way to start practising mindfulness.

“It’s called a non-formal practice,” he says. “Mindfulness is not just about closing your eyes and meditating; it’s about enjoying all the other things you do in your day, including eating.”

Eating mindfully will not only prevent you from overeating or making poor food choices; it can help you to notice any issues you might have with your relationship with food.

“People eat for certain moods,” Calarco says. “Being mindful of what you put in your body is the first step. Then ask yourself, why are you doing it? What is the feeling that triggered it? It could be a need for comfort, you could be missing something, it could be stress. This will make you more aware of your relationship with food.”

Take the time to enjoy your food:
Take the time to enjoy your food: every delicious bite.

The flow-on effect

Once you start to eat mindfully, Calarco says this can have a positive flow-on effect to other areas in your life, including your performance at work.

“Think about all those things you’re doing in default mode, from waking up in the morning to having a shower to commuting to walking,” he says. “If you can train yourself to be focused on just eating, for example, you can also train yourself to be focused on doing all those other things in your day – with full attention.

“That’s what mindfulness at its most fundamental level is – attention training. Eating more mindfully is a way to train your attention to do just one thing and be engaged with that one thing. And then that mindfulness becomes a habit in the long term.”