What does it mean to eat with consciousness
Conscious eating is an integral aspect of life as it is one essential activity that provides the body with nutritional elements. Basically, eating connotes the process of ingesting food substances into the body so that the body becomes energized to perform its functions optimally.
However, while eating is important for survival, healthy eating is quintessential for healthy living. The point here is, it’s not just about gulping down anything into the body, it’s about achieving satiety whenever you eat. Suffice to say, eating should be a conscious activity that is targeted toward your overall wellbeing.
What is conscious eating?
Being conscious means being mindful. It depicts a sense of self-awareness which helps one to gain control over certain situation, habits, activities or even, feeding.
Thus, conscious eating or mindful eating as it also called, entails adopting techniques that helps you feed better. It’s about eating correctly, mindfully and at the right time.
At the flip side is ‘binge eating or bingeing’, an eating disorder which makes you vulnerable to massive and uncontrolled weight gain, consequently, culminating into obesity and posing serious health risk to your health. Binge eating refers to uncontrolled or unrestricted feeding habit. It’s that situation when you just consume any food item on your path without regard for proportion and regardless of whether you are hungry or not. As a matter of fact, it is associated with depression and anxiety.
Why you should embrace conscious eating?
The benefits of conscious eating are enormous, however, here’s a few;
- Helps you achieve satiety: by eating mindfully, it helps you to attain satiety which is the required level of satisfaction needed by the body to function correctly.
- Helps you to conquer binge eating: as pointed out earlier, binge eating can only do more harm that good to your health, hence, it should be avoided. One of the most effective ways to avoid bingeing on food or related substances is conscious eating.
- Gives you control over your body: conscious eating helps you to identify emotional cues that stirs up hunger in you, thus, prompting you to eat even when you are not truly hungry. It helps you differentiate true hunger from emotionally driven ones.
FAQ: How to eat mindfully?
Here are some tips on how to develop the habit of conscious eating:
- Eat only when hungry. Understand how your body works so as to be able to differentiate between physical hunger and emotional triggers
- Always eat slowly as eating fast conditions your body to respond to hunger triggers
- Always eat with your health and mental wellbeing in focus
- Control the effect your feelings have over your feeding
- Stop when you are full not when your stomach cannot take more
