When you eat mindfully, you give full attention to what you experience. Slowly, you gain awareness in four aspects:

Body: All physical aspects. Are you holding your breath? Lifting a spoon to your mouth? Shivering? Feeling bloated? Is your stomach growling? Is your mouth tasting something? Are you salivating? Is your body lethargic?

Thought: What you are thinking. It may be: “that looks delicious”, “I’m so hungry”, “I can’t eat that because it’s fat”, “That’s so sinful”, “I will never lose weight because I have no discipline”. Notice whether your thoughts are factual, positive, negative, critical, or judgmental.

Feeling: Anything that deals with emotions. Boredom, excitement, stress, unhappiness, guilt, disgust.

Mind: (personally, I find this the hardest to comprehend because your thoughts and feelings all go through your mind) The easiest way is to think of it as: the state of your mind. Is your mind focused, tired, observant, wary, preoccupied, troubled, calm, craving, restless, content?

These four aspects always link up to each other. They connect the intangible (our mind’s processes, our physical sensations, our thoughts) with the tangible (our physical senses). Normally, you wouldn’t notice it, but when you break it down this way, you realise the many things that form our actions and behaviours.

It may not be possible to analyse every single thought or action like that example. However, you can start thinking about these four aspects at times where you remember losing control before. If you can determine the why behind the what that you do, then you slowly start regaining control of your action and your body.

Because it focuses so much on you and your awareness, it helps you filter out all the unnecessary and meaningless “noise” around you. It may be your family’s negative comments or your friend’s successful weight loss transformation on Instagram. If you do mindfulness right, all these things don’t matter. All that matters is you.

Gradually, you become confident because you know your body best, you know what’s going through your mind, and the thoughts that guide you or sabotage you. You stop criticising the way you look or feeling guilty about having dessert.

You accept foods for what they are and live with your choices.

If I asked you to describe the last meal you had in detail, would you be able to? Now, did you enjoy every single bite of it? Did you enjoy the last bite, or the middle few bites, as much as the first one? Most of the time, it would be a no.

I myself have been through such meals. When I have nachos, after that first explosion of flavour in my mouth (creamy, sharp, salty cheese on crunchy corn nachos), the bites that come after are just a fleeting taste before it is all wolfed down.

If you pick up mindful eating, you would learn how to savour food with all your senses. Going through the process of mindful eating allows you to realise when you stop enjoying a food, and to stop once you’re done, especially with treats.

It allows you to enjoy food for what it is, in appropriate portions, with no guilt – just pure happiness.

Mindful eating is not a specific type of diet (e.g. intermittent fasting/keto/atkins/low-carb/high-protein/blood-type, etc.), and so it does not restrict what you eat. If you’ve worked through the last step right, you will realise that mindful eating is naturally self-restricting.

In time, you learn to be aware of your thoughts and behaviours, and how that affects your feelings and your bodily sensations. Eventually, you learn to stop eating when you feel just right.

A better human to yourself, and the people around you. Mindfulness can be applied to so many aspects of our lives. You start reflecting on: the way you yell at your children who are throwing a tantrum while the TV blasts in the background and dishes lie piled up in the sink, the way you half-heartedly nod and “uh-huh” in response to your spouse telling you about his or her day, the way you purse your lips and passive-aggressively strut out a meeting you were unhappy about.

Being mindful of what you’re thinking, how that affects your emotions, how it translates into a physical response, and how that physical response, in turn, affects you, is a form of reflection. This reflection can help change your behaviour and, perhaps, make you a better person.

Text: Yan Yin Phoi/Shape

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