This week on The Living Experiment, we’re talking Conscious Eating — the art of more fully enjoying your eating experiences and relating to your food in healthier ways.
We explore how rushed and unconscious eating tends to stoke body’s stress response, and also how it undermines digestion.
We look at how distracted eating robs you of satisfaction and numbs you to your body’s natural satiety signals.
We share some practical techniques for bringing more awareness to your pacing, posture, breathing, and sensory experience.
Finally, we offer you some experiments that invite you to begin developing your own approach to conscious eating — starting with your very next meal.
“Conscious Eating” Episode Highlights
- How you eat is as important as what you eat — Pilar and Dallas share their background with building mindful eating habits
- Chewing as a self-soothing action, and all of the pro-digestive and metabolic signals that occur even before food enters your mouth
- Being present in the experience of eating — taking time to notice how your food looks and smells
- Slowing down the eating process by thoroughly chewing and enjoying flavors and textures
- The stress-busting benefits of good eating posture (and posture in general)
- Why interacting with technology while eating works against conscious eating
- The important role meals can play in promoting ultradian rhythm breaks (what Pilar calls “URBs”)
- Our human need for pleasure and beauty, and how mindful eating is a healthy way to feed it
- Seven suggestions for integrating healthy eating (via an article in Experience Life magazine): eliminate distractions, slow down, sit tall and still, breathe, take small bites, chew thoroughly, and enjoy
Set aside one meal to eat on your own and try at least two of the seven suggestions, starting with removing all distractions. Notice how trying one technique might lead you to naturally adopt some of the others.
The next time you eat a meal, put your phone away. Take note of how that makes you feel — awkward, uncomfortable, anxious, self-conscious, etc. — especially if you’re eating in public.
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Resources
- Pilar’s Revolutionary Act #32: “Savor What You Eat”.
- Dallas’s More Social Less Media program — resetting your relationship with media and technology.
- Our “Pause” episode — more on the myriad benefits of ultradian rhythm breaks.
- From Experience Life magazine, an article on “Conscious Eating”.
- From food psychologist Marc David: “Eating for Pleasure” and “6 Ways to Simplify and Improve Your Relationship With Food”, both via Experience Life magazine.
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