What is Mindless Eating?
It’s well known that emotional eating and distracted eating can lead to, well, overeating. Social, emotional, and conditional cues can be so strong that they cause us to become detached from our own internal hunger and satiety cues. The result…bouts of mindless eating. When sitting down for a meal, standing…, or even on the go, it’s normal for everything we planned to eat for the day to fly out of our minds.
Studies have long found that people experience higher intakes of energy and fat during stressful periods of life. Often this increase comes in the form of highly palatable convenience type foods where speed takes precedence over nutrition quality. Think bags of chips, fast food, trips to the pantry for a quick grab. We also know that people tend to eat more when distracted by screens. In fact, one laboratory study showed that people eating with television or audio recording stimuli ate more than when given the same meal undisturbed in a quiet room.
Fortunately, mindfulness practices can disrupt emotional and external cues by bringing awareness and attention to our eating experiences. That is why special attention has been made to include mindfulness in weight management and lifestyle change programs. The idea is that this practice might help control appetite, eating behavior, food choice, or heal a struggling relationship with food.
Mindful Eating: Where Have We Been?
In 2010 the book Savor, authors Hanh and Cheong explain that mindless eating is a strong driver of weight gain and obesity. They introduce Mindful Eating as a combination of nutrition and Buddhist teachings most memorably with step by step instructions on how to eat an apple (which is more like a meditation). The Apple Meditation begins with giving your undivided attention to an apple, sitting with no distractions, savoring every detail: taste, aroma, sweetness, juiciness. Other steps include to take note of the color, imagine who tended to the tree that gave you the apple, and instructions to chew completely and consciously. In short, the theory behind ME is that by heightening your awareness to what you eat, as well as environmental concerns, you become more connected to yourself and the world, and in turn you will eat healthier.
Intuitive Eating, a book written by Evelyn Tribole MS RDN and Elyse Resch MS RDN in 1995, is another widespread practice gaining recent popularity. Intuitive Eating pays attention to internal hunger and satiety cues along with embracing body acceptance and eschewing diet culture. In step five, of a ten step program, you should honor your fullness by listening to the signals in your body. They recommend a pause while eating to consider the taste of the food and check in with your level of hunger. Intuitive Eating depends on trusting physical sensations to determine what the body needs.
In a 2021 systematic review of the influence of Mindful Eating and Intuitive Eating strategies, results showed that both strategies fail to consistently reduce caloric intake or improve diet quality.
Mindful Eating: A New Model
Of all the existing mindful eating protocols, there is no standard that exists today. However, a new new model in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (shown below) has been proposed that conceptualizes the practice of mindful eating and is expanded to include pressing issues that many people care about today. This mindful eating approach includes eating as a form of self care but also for the care of others: animals, people and the planet…a more socially enlightened mindful eating approach mirroring social change that is predominant today. Mindful Eating for Health Promotion and Sustainability is guided by four aspects: what to eat, why we eat what we eat, how much to eat, and how to eat.
- What to eat: The choices we make include considerations of environment, animal welfare and social justice. Choosing what to eat within this framework will support the fair treatment of farm and food system workers including fair pay, the treatment of animals, soil erosion, and carbon footprint.
- Why we eat what we eat: The individual works toward self efficacy, making healthy choices amongst a system of heavy advertising and societal constructs with available resources.
- How much to eat: Mindfulness techniques require the individual to be aware of hunger and fullness but this aspect also includes attention to minimizing food waste and controlling the internal and external cues. Internal cues are emotions that may drive intake and external cues include distractions or perhaps how food is presented.
- How to eat: The individual easts without distraction, in a pleasurable environment, and appreciates the food with all senses.
6 Ways to Get Started: Mindful Eating for Health Promotion and Sustainability
1. Farmers’ Markets
Farmers’ Markets are a great way to reduce carbon footprint, improve equity, and facilitate personal connections to our food. Sellers are bound to guidelines that ensure they are selling their products directly to the consumer, cutting down on emissions from transportation. In addition, when growing their produce and raising livestock, farmers use techniques that capture and hold on to carbon, minimize chemical runoff into the water supply, and prevent soil erosion. When food is purchased from a farmer’s market, customers are also keeping that business going and supporting the livelihoods of their employees. Knowing the farmers at your local market can also benefit your personal health goals because one important aspect of mindful eating for health promotion and sustainability is appreciating the human and natural resources that brought you your food.
2. Eating In Season
Supermarkets are stocked with almost every kind of produce all year long, making it challenging to know what is in season. By knowing what is truly in season, you can work toward a more ecologically sustainable diet. Benefits of shopping seasonally include lower cost, improved flavor, better nutrition profile, and less environmental impact.
Did you know that conditions are so unfavorable in Florida for tomatoes that the variety grown must be selected for durability rather than flavor? In fact, tomatoes grown in Florida are picked so early they require ripening with ethylene gas, leaving the taste undeveloped. Sadly, produce grown in an environment not conducive involves using additional chemicals to counter adverse conditions. Moreover, if buying produce from out of the country, we are not even sure what their growing practices are and how they affect the environment. Overall, buying out of season supports increased carbon emission due to long-distance travel by planes, ships, and trucks.
By shopping seasonally and locally, you are supporting farmers that improve soil health through means less harmful to the environment. The USDA has a great webpage of produce by season to help guide your shopping and cooking plans at home.
3. Food Waste
In the United States, 40% of food is wasted, translating to over $160 billion in lost food. This is concerning for both the greenhouse gasses formed from landfills and, at the same time, many households are experiencing food insecurity. We know that a large percentage of food waste is happening at the consumer level, so the good news is as consumers, we can make a difference.
One aspect of Mindful Eating for Health Promotion and Sustainability is recognizing how much to eat. By listening to hunger and satiety cues and reducing distraction, we can provide the proper portions for ourselves and minimize waste. We can also reduce waste, and the amount we eat by saving leftovers. Whether you are saving half your meal from a restaurant or just what you cooked at home the night before- you can use that for lunch the next day. My favorite thing to do is bring home a small amount of vegetables from a night out and add a sunny side up egg to it in the morning for breakfast. If I leave over a small amount of protein, Ill add in some vegetables for a delicious lunch.
4. Ultra-Processed Food
One of the single most impactful ways you can mindfully incorporate an ecologically sustainable diet is by avoiding ultra-processed food (UPF). UPF’s are contributing to environmental damage due to packaging, bottles, wrapping and garbage, as well as transportation energy use. Production and consumption of UPF”s are leading the environmental and nutrition problems facing our planet. By mindfully choosing not to purchase these products for the good of our planet, you can reduce risk of depression, overweight, obesity, and many chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer.
5. Follow Organizations that Promote Rights of Farmworkers
Think about the consequences of human workers when following a particular diet. Take for example the recent popularity of a plant-based diet. Vikram Kaleka and Kate C. Burt PHD, RDN, explain this in their article, “Understanding Privilege In The Vegetarian And Plant Based Diet Movement”. A proper plant-based diet includes a variety of fresh fruits and vegetables, legumes, B12 supplementation and appropriate vitamin D exposure. Kaleka and Burt describe how continuing to espouse plant-based diets in the name of the protection of animals results in more money funneled into corporations that utilize predominantly non-white human workers.
If you search around the internet you can find organizations that seek to protect the rights of workers across the food system. By following these organizations you can build a shopping list of food from companies and markets that treat and pay their workers respectfully. The Fair Food Program is an example of an organization that supports the protection of farmworkers from abuse and slavery.
6. Make Mealtime a Pleasurable Experience
Eating should be a shared experience with friends and family ion a pleasant environment. Check out my blog post on Dietary Guidelines describing the Brazilian Dietary Guideline. The Brazil Dietary Guidelines emphasizes that meal planning, shopping, cooking and eating is a shared experience that promotes connection to loved ones.
Eat Healthy and Sustainably; Mindfully
It’s expected that by 2050 the world population will exceed 9 billion, and the capacity to provide safe and healthy food and water equitably will diminish. Therefore to promote a sustainable food supply, we must become informed in ways that help continue to maintain the needs of the present while reducing stress on food and water systems. Naturally, when thinking about doing our part, we immediately think of tending to a large farm of our own – and if we can’t live off our own land, then why bother? But that simply isn’t true. By shopping at farmers’ markets, mainly eating in-season produce, minimizing food waste, and avoiding UPF’s, we are mindfully promoting our own health and the health of the planet. But sustainability also includes the sustainability of the workers within the food system, so being mindful of how we buy the bulk of our foods that promotes the fair treatment of human workers is also an important step in Mindful Eating for Health Promotion and Sustainability.
References
Bellisle, F., et al. “Non Food-Related Environmental Stimuli Induce Increased Meal Intake in Healthy Women: Comparison of Television Viewing versus Listening to a Recorded Story in Laboratory Settings.” Appetite, vol. 43, no. 2, Oct. 2004, pp. 175–180, 10.1016/j.appet.2004.04.004. Accessed 10 Oct. 2020.
Fung, Teresa T., et al. “An Expanded Model for Mindful Eating for Health Promotion and Sustainability: Issues and Challenges for Dietetics Practice.” Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, vol. 116, no. 7, July 2016, pp. 1081–1086, 10.1016/j.jand.2016.03.013.
Kristeller, Jean L., and Ruth Q. Wolever. “Mindfulness-Based Eating Awareness Training for Treating Binge Eating Disorder: The Conceptual Foundation.” Eating Disorders, vol. 19, no. 1, 28 Dec. 2010, pp. 49–61, 10.1080/10640266.2011.533605.
Monteiro, Carlos Augusto, et al. “The UN Decade of Nutrition, the NOVA Food Classification and the Trouble with Ultra-Processing.” Public Health Nutrition, vol. 21, no. 1, 21 Mar. 2017, pp. 5–17, www.cambridge.org/core/journals/public-health-nutrition/article/un-decade-of-nutrition-the-nova-food-classification-and-the-trouble-with-ultraprocessing/2A9776922A28F8F757BDA32C3266AC2A, 10.1017/s1368980017000234.
OLIVER, G, and J WARDLE. “Perceived Effects of Stress on Food Choice.” Physiology & Behavior, vol. 66, no. 3, May 1999, pp. 511–515, 10.1016/s0031-9384(98)00322-9.
