I’m hosting a free webinar called Mindful Eating: Bringing Peace and Presence to Your Relationship with Food on Thursday, March 10th at 12 pm EST. Here is why I’m so excited to be offering this.
I first learned about mindful eating at a yoga retreat at Kripalu with Bryan Kest. There were a few hundred yogis packed into a large hall with a massively high ceiling. We all spread out on the floor, sitting on our mats and bolsters.
Bryan shared his ideas about mindfulness and yoga and even advised us to chew our food 50 times before swallowing.
At the time, Bryan’s advice came to me when trying to control my weight was a top priority. I had taken meat out of my diet. I tried eating a vegan diet. I was even dabbling in raw foods. I had studied Ayurveda and designed my diet around my doshas. I hadn’t tried mindful eating. In my mind, I wondered; could this be what I was doing wrong? Was I eating too much because I was eating too fast?
There is no doubt, I started practicing mindful eating for weight loss. This is the common and popular marketing tactic clinicians and coaches use when they offer mindful eating classes. They imply that when you slow down while eating, you’ll eat less.
While it definitely took me longer to eat my meals when I was following Bryan’s advice, I’m not sure if I ate less. I certainly paid a lot more attention to what I was eating. At times, I even got bored. Eating felt like work.
Thanks to my early days of practicing mindful eating, I woke up a muscle of tuning into the experience of eating. Yes, I went to the extreme. But after spending years eating lunch at my desk at work and snacking in my car, this extra attention served me well.
If you’re considering practicing mindful eating, you may be wondering if it needs to have the laborious and painful beginnings that my practice did. Do you need to spend a weekend at a yoga retreat to learn how? Do you need to spend over 30 minutes at each meal? Does mindful eating require soooo much chewing?
In my opinion, no. It doesn’t.
I learned mindful eating with all the wrong intentions. I didn’t want to enjoy food more. I just wanted to eat less. I wasn’t looking for more richness and enjoyable taste. I was trying to make my body smaller. Now, my relationship with food and body has evolved so that I care for my body deeply, which includes the foods I choose and how I take the time to eat them all.
Tuning in to your eating experience is much more than chewing. It starts way before you even sit down to eat. Mindful eating is a practice of tuning into your mind and body.
This is why I’m excited to share with you my free to attend webinar called Mindful Eating: Bringing Peace and Presence to Your Relationship with Food on Thursday, March 10th at 12 pm EST.
I want to share with you mindful eating while considering the principles of Intuitive Eating. This means you’ll be learning how to eat mindfully to create more joy and satisfaction in your experience of eating.
If this speaks to you, I’d love for you to join me. We will be eating together on this call. Don’t worry. You can do this with your camera off. Here is the sign up link.