Mindful Eating

Someone has once said, ‘How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the
character of our experience, and therefore, the quality of our lives.’ Do you think you have maintained
quality of life? Eating is an important act for our bodies to absorb energy every day. However, few of us
have done mindful eating. Mindful eating means to be aware of the changes of our bodies, emotions,
etc. during the process of eating. You might want to ask for the reason we should do this. It’s because
high quality lives require mindful eating as it provides emotional values and health benefits to us.
Mindful eating is a long process that can cure ourselves with food and concentration. By the
following procedure, you can start your journey. First, try to use your non-dominant hand for eating.
Then, chew your food for longer time in your mouth and feel the movement of eating, chewing and
swallowing. Last, stop eating when your body tells you that you’re full. Let me share a little more about
the mindful meal I had last week. I had pork belly baked with cheese for my dinner. When I’m enjoying
it, I slowly chew and swallow. The pork belly tastes a bit salty and seems it’s a bit overcooked as it is too
dry. However, when I eat the pork with the cheese, the smell and taste of cheese made me feel like I’m
in heaven. It’s really delicious! There was not much food, but I did enjoy my meal and I didn’t rush for
anything, which let me feel really relaxed. For me, I do agree that the process of mindful eating does
take a bit long, but it’s worth to do it.
Eating does not just mean absorbing essential nutrients into our body, but it also brings us a lot
more advantages than we can imagine. When we’re having our meal, we’ll get the feeling of
satisfaction, we do not have to rush and the meal will give us a pleasant feeling. Nowadays, urban
people are getting busy and do not have time to stop and enjoy a meal. Through mindful eating, we can
find back the feeling of “living” instead of just “surviving”. On the other hand, a slower step of eating can
provide us more time for better digestion, and so a healthier body. A healthy body means more than
anything to us, so that we have to take god care of it.
Reading till here, I’m sure you’ll be curious about whether it is effective or not. The answer is
definitely YES! Since it can let us have an enjoyable meal to feel ourselves , and that we’ll not always be
in the “nervous mode”. This should be practised by the urban people twice a week as we’re always
rushing here and there and do not have time for a enjoyable meal. Using just a bit more time on feeling
ourselves will change us a lot. This really helps us to improve our efficiencies during other activities or
work.
After knowing the ways and benefits of mindful eating, you must want some suggestions on how
yo apply it to your daily lives. Practise the methods twice a week to prevent you from over-stressful
from your busy lives. The suggested time for your mindful meal will be dinner time as you’ll normally
have more time to spend on me, and you can also treat it as a “me-time” to make a deep conversation
with yourself. Not long ago, I was being too stressful, and I tried to calm myself down and relax myself
by having a mindful meal. This saves me from the suffocating life and that comforted myself. After the
meal, I was back on track to my busy life and I found myself working with higher efficiency!
Overall, mindful eating provides us with both emotional and health benefits that we can’t reject
it and that we can’t obtain it from anywhere else. It’s not just the food curing us, but also the
concentration we put in it and the rest we get from it. Remember, no matter how busy we are, having a
delicious and mindful meal is always the key to a high quality of life.