How to Eat Mindfully, for Busy Women

In a world full of busy-ness, it can be challenging to slow down.

You may have taught yourself to slow down a little before bed, to get into a better bedtime routine and be more relaxed. Or, you may slow down when you’re commuting to work in the morning to avoid driving recklessly.

Do you slow down when you eat though?

Mindful eating is the practice of focusing only on eating while you’re eating. It means slowing things down, even just a bit.

It means enjoying your food more, and overeating or making poor choices less frequently.

Mindful eating is simple, yet has so many benefits. So, I’m going to teach you how to eat mindfully, even if you’re a busy woman who loves multitasking.

Why It’s Important to Eat Mindfully for Healthy Eating Habits

Eating mindfully means using your pre-frontal cortex, the more deliberate decision-making and future-focused part of your brain to drive your actions of eating.

Typically, the more primitive part of the brain will drive your action during eating because our primitive brains were made to covet food for survival, especially high calorie food. (This was when food was scarce and we had to hunt for it, or find it growing on trees.)

So this means that if you aren’t using the pre-frontal cortex while eating, the primitive brain takes over.

When the primitive brain takes over, there’s sometimes no stopping it from overeating or eating foods that are high in sugar and fat. (I don’t mean strawberries and avocados either. I mean chocolate cake and French fries.)

When you end up getting a craving or urge and act upon it, your primitive brain is what takes over here as well.

• Related: How to Conquer Your Eating and Drinking Urges
• Related: 5 Clever Ways to End Overeating

Therefore, when you eat mindfully, you are eliciting your pre-frontal cortex and making deliberate decisions about what food and how much you’re putting in your mouth.

This really matters when it comes to healthy eating habits.

The more often you mindfully eat, the more likely you’ll get into the habit of making healthier eating decisions, using your pre-frontal cortex.

The more often you mindlessly eat (eat while doing another task or eat quickly), the more likely you’ll get into the habit of making unhealthy eating choices. Again, that’s because your primitive brain will take over.

Another big reason why it’s important to eat mindfully is that you can actually enjoy your food.

When you are only focused on eating and slow it down just a bit, you can actually appreciate the flavor, aroma, and texture more.

You get the nourishment AND you get the enjoyment. It’s a win-win.

How to Actually Eat Mindfully

It may sound like eating mindfully just means slowing down and not-multitasking. Essentially yes, that’s true.

However, I have some really simple steps for you to take, so it makes eating mindfully the easy thing to do, and help turn it into a habit. Because well, healthy eating habits are key to living a more healthy and fulfilling life.

Step 1 – Schedule It In

Set aside at least 15-20 minutes in your schedule to eat whichever meal or snack you find yourself eating while multitasking or rushing. If you mindlessly eat for all of your meals, then just start with one meal a day, so your brain can get used to a small change.

• Related: 15 Healthy Snacking Habits to Start Right Now
• Related: Should You Break Your Habit of Snacking at Night?

Put this time in your calendar, set an alarm, do whatever you need to do to ensure you have this block of time set aside to just eat.

Step 2 – Choose a Distraction-Free Space

Choose a location to eat that you won’t be distracted by things like a computer, TV, etc. If you choose a space where you don’t have much distraction, you’re less likely to be on autopilot and start doing the activity you were in the habit of doing while eating.

• Related: 5 Quick and Healthy Work Lunches for the Week

As you probably know, a large portion of what you do each day is due to habits you’ve formed. To break a habit, you need to remove the thing that triggers the behavior or action.

By being in a space that doesn’t have the thing that would trigger you to start doing something else while you’re eating, you’ll be able to eat mindfully more easily.

Step 3 – Separate Yourself From Your Phone

Leave your phone in another room. Yes, this is really really important.

I know it’s painful, but trust me, you’ll see how effective it is.

Our phones are little pocket computers, entertainers, you name it. Just removing yourself from a room with a computer or TV won’t be enough if you have your phone on you. It’s too easy to pull it out and start scrolling or searching.

I’m guilty of this, so I understand how difficult it is to not eat and scroll at the same time.

So, even if it means not reading my blog post while eating, that’s fine. I’d rather you learn how to eat mindfully. (Just be sure to read the blog post after you eat so you get more healthy eating habit how-to’s…wink wink.)

Step 4 – Chew Slowly

If you deliberately slow down your chewing, you are using your pre-frontal cortex. This means you will be less likely to overeat. It will decide when you’ve had enough. That pre-frontal cortex is future-focused, so has your best interests in mind for the future.

When you chew slowly, you’re also going to be able to enjoy the food a bit longer.

Step 5 – Pay Attention to the Senses

Because you’re chewing more slowly, you’ll more easily be able to pay attention to taste and texture. When you pay attention to taste and texture, you can enjoy the food more and be more satisfied.

Take it to the next level and also pay attention to smell. When you really smell a food, the flavor is enhanced when you actually taste it.

When your brain registers satisfaction, it is actually more likely to tell you when it’s had enough to eat and you’ll stop eating.

If you want to read more about that, I recommend the book, The Hungry Brain by Stephan J. Guyenet PhD. In it, he explains the inner workings of the brain and why we can overeat, especially food that is unhealthy. It’s an easy and fascinating read.

Step 6 – Repeat

For a behavior or action to become habit, something done on autopilot, you need to repeat it multiple times. There is a very wide range for the duration needed for something to become habit and that’s because there are just too many variables.

What can be agreed upon though is that the more frequently a behavior is repeated, the quicker it tends to become a habit.

So, keep practicing the steps above and you’ll start noticing that you eat mindfully at every meal, even on days that you feel overwhelmed with tasks.

Final Notes

Practice makes perfect with any new behavior. So, don’t worry if it doesn’t stick right away. That’s very normal, so just be sure to keep doing it.

Luckily, this new behavior of mindful eating tends to be enjoyable for most people, so once you do it once or twice, you’ll most likely want to keep doing it.

This makes it MUCH easier to turn into a habit.

It’s just a matter of making sure to follow the steps each time, so you don’t end up slipping back into old habits of rushing or multitasking.