End Binge Eating – Start Mindful Eating!

me&my health up podcast episode #14 – Transcript

Anthony Hartcher 0:00
Welcome to another insightful episode of health up. I’m your host, Anthony Hatcher and health up seeks to enhance and enlighten the well being of others.

Today, we’re going to be talking about a topic on mindfulness. And it’s not only going to cover what mindfulness is, and how it works, it’s also going to look at how we can apply mindfulness to eating and to avoid binge eating, and really enjoy the foods that we eat.

So let’s get started. What is mindfulness? So mindfulness is the act of being in the now. It’s getting your focus into and your attention into the now, it’s not thinking about the past or the future. It’s about totally immersing yourself into the here and now. There’s many strategies in which you can apply to get yourself into the here and now. And I’m going to be talking about finding a strategy that works for you.

Because often we’ve referred to mindfulness as meditation and meditations not for everyone. There are certain personality types, the ones that like to move and be busy, and mindfulness is going to be an extremely difficult practice. I mean, well, meditation will be an extremely difficult practice for those types of people. So I’m going to help you come up with finding something that works for you, and being able to apply that throughout your day.

Mindfulness is something you don’t just do once and expect a benefit, it needs to become part of our everyday life, in order to get a cumulative benefit over time, and studies will show the benefits of mindfulness over time. A consistent practice of mindfulness over time, results in great health benefits from being more attentive, missing, more, energised, better leaks, and feeling more at ease, feeling better about ourselves. And they’re just some of the few benefits that mindfulness or regular mindfulness practice can bring to us.

Let’s talk about how can you find a mindfulness practice that works for you? Well, it’s thinking about something that brings you into the now. So something that really draws your focus. And if you need some assistance in drawing this focus, or we can resort to being more aware of our senses, to just seeing, you know, sitting getting comfortable, you could be lying down, you can be walking, and it’s connecting with the environment around you using your senses.

You can use your sights to engage in something and admire it for what it is, you can use your ears to tune in to a certain sound and keep your attention to that sound. So it could be waves breaking down at the beach, it could be a bird that’s chirping in a tree, it’s just tuning your senses into that particular object or, you know, it could be nature, could be something in the environment, it could be a car. So, you know, like, people can get mindful doing the housecleaning, for example, it can be because it takes their thought of everything, they just get into that task and focus solely on that path. Others that don’t connect with cleaning, it’s not mindfulness, because they’re looking for distractions.

So if there’s a particular task that you can block out, or that thinking about what you need to do, coming up, or  worrying about the future, or regretting some past moments, or, you know, living in the past.

Yeah, so it’s just that activity and that that activity can be sport, it can be basketball, you know, it could be shooting darts, could be well, there are many aspects, you can go through Iran, you can go for a walk. So it’s just really engaging in that activity and being present feeling present in that activity. So there are so many ways in which we can get mindful and that you know, I mentioned connecting with the senses. One of the sensors that inform, it’s not a second that it’s one of the activities we can get focused on, is activities like breathing so drawing your attention to the breathing and just embracing breath. So just being attentive of you breathing in, and you know, the cool air that you might be breathing in, and then what it feels, what does that air? What feels like when you’re exhaling?  Is it warmer? It should be warmer air. That means that breathing deeply, if it’s warmer air, yeah, so there’s some of mindful technique.

Now, how do we apply this to mindful eating, and the benefit to doing mindful eating is that you eat less. And we certainly live in a society that could do with eating less. And how do we also enjoy the foods that we want to have less of, we can do that through mindful eating? And, as I alluded to, before, you know, connection with senses is what we need to do before eating, and then during eating, and then we really enjoy the experience.

Hence we can enjoy it more and have less of it, and really gain, I guess, the feeling and the sensation of what it brings to us. Without that feeling of, I’ve overindulged, I’ve eaten too much of that and that feeling comes with when you’re eating distractedly, you know, you just distract your mind distracted on something else, it’s not on the food.

So the moment we draw our attention to the sort of food, and it becomes our focus, and we connect our senses, such as our smell our sight to that food, then it helps with not only enjoying it, whilst it’s in the mouth, it helps with digestion, because, you know, turning our attention to that we’re about two weeks something you know, those senses, such as our eyesight, and our smell, let the digestive system know that it’s time for that. To get ready to prepare to break down that food.

So digestive enzymes are secreted, when those senses are engaged with the food you’re about to eat. And so it really helps with not only helping you eat less of what you love but also helping you digest and not feel uncomfortable with what you’ve just eaten. So some people experienced that bloating, feeling that bloating, the feeling can purely just come from eating too far, eating too much. And there probably could be nothing wrong, you know, with your digestive system other than your eating too quickly.

And that typically happens in today’s world, because we’re so busy, we’re running around, we don’t have time to eat. But first of all, you need to put aside the time to eat correctly in this space in your day. And embrace the food you’re about to eat, it doesn’t matter what the food is, if you connect with it, connect your senses to it, you will enjoy more of it and eat less of it, which is going to be better overall. So, you know, it’s picking up that food, it’s engaging your sight with that food, it’s you thinking about how yummy it’s going to be. And having a vision of, you know, the, I guess the celebration or the yumminess of it going in your mouth and spending some time engaging with the food is very important, the stock, smelling it, drawing your attention eyes to it.

And then once we get it in our mouth, we need to really chew the food and Chew it well and enjoy it whilst it’s in their mouth. Because that’s where the joy of eating is, is well obviously there’s the surroundings such as the company with that also and the joy of the eating experience. But the food itself, it’s joyful when it’s in the mouth and we need to maximise that experience. So we want to chew for longer, which really helps with digestion because good digestion starts in the mouth, the digestive enzymes that are released in the mouth start breaking down the carbohydrates and fat. And so we want to allow the food to spend some time there and we want to break up the foods so there’s less work that has to be done as it moves down the digestive system. So you really want to chew until it’s liquid and by chewing until it’s liquid you enjoy it for longer, and you’ll find that that satisfaction is registered and you will end up eating less because you’re enjoying that small amount.

So that’s really the important point about today. It is how you are not only finding a mindful practice that will work for you or that you can apply on a regular basis. And it can be a combination of all the things that I mentioned. You know, doing a bit of sport during the day, doing a bit of exercise during the day, getting out in nature during the day, connecting with your breath.

During the day, all these activities can be applied throughout the day. And that is where you’re going to get the real benefits of mindfulness. And then seeing and applying that mindfulness to food is where you get additional benefits. In terms of better digestion. When we better digest our food, we better assimilate the nutrients. So we end up a healthier person overall, not only for the mindfulness practice because it helps our mental health, it helps our digestive health. It helps our simulation and nutrients that help us think better and make more rational decisions as opposed to irrational decisions. So we’re going to get so many benefits from having regular consistent practice and mindfulness. And we’re going to get lots of digestive benefits and feel better overall by consuming less, but still have the same enjoyment of the food by mindful eating.

I hope you got something out of today’s talk. And certainly, please feel free to reach out or to put comments where I post this, to let me know what other topics you’d like me to talk about or what other experts you’d like me to interview because I’m going to be constantly producing more me&my health up content, and I really want it to be tailored to your interests and where you want to be empowered through education.

So please let me know. Please comment, please like, and share. And yes, go out there and practice mindfulness regularly to get all those benefits that I mentioned.

Take care everyone. Bye for now.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai