Make your lunch break count by practicing mindful eating

What does this have to do with eating? You can apply mindfulness to almost every aspect of your life, including how you treat and consume food. The Singapore Health Promotion Board emphasises “moment-by-moment awareness of thoughts, feelings and environment” — and this translates into being fully aware of your eating experiences, bodily sensations, and thoughts and emotions regarding food. And following the theory of mindfulness, it is done in full consciousness and without any judgement.

A mindful attitude towards food helps improve not only our mental and emotional well-being, but our bodily health as well. For instance, mindful eating can help reduce stress, which in turn eases inflammation. It can also help relieve digestive problems, especially in people with ulcerative colitis and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). It improves our digestion and makes us feel full sooner, thus avoiding overeating, which often leads to tiredness or fatigue after a meal.

But mindful eating shouldn’t be confused with the conventional diet-based rhetoric of watching what you eat. It’s not about controlling yourself — too much salt in this, not enough protein in that — or limiting your intake to low-fat or low-calorie foods. Instead, it’s about paying attention to what nourishes your body and gives you energy. 

This may look different from person to person. There’s no one standard for applying mindful eating in our lives.

In an office setting, where you’re often given 30 minutes to an hour for lunch and expected to go back to work straight after, mindful eating can make a significant difference. Overeating or eating foods that aren’t nutritional can leave you feeling sleepy after eating, making it hard to keep working in the afternoon. Eating quickly doesn’t give your brain enough time to register whether you’re still hungry or not. And since mindful eating encourages eating much slower than our usual pace, it gives your brain enough time to register that you’re already full.

Additionally, mindfulness helps us avoid distracted eating, which happens when we’re doing something (like watching a TV show) and have unhealthy snacks within our reach. You can curb this practice by preparing snacks with less sugar, sodium, and saturated fats in smaller containers. 

On the flip side, when you’re winding down after a long day of work, you’ll want something that won’t leave you so energised that it’s hard to fall asleep. So putting together a dinner that contains more foods like nuts, rice, fatty fish, or cherries can improve sleep quality. This is because of their nutritional properties. The practice of mindful eating reminds you to be aware of these small details that improve your overall quality of life.

Aside from being more conscious of how we prepare and eat our food, mindful eating also encourages us to look at where our produce comes from–are they locally sourced, or provided by more sustainable vendors? Because we’re becoming more conscious of what we put in our bodies and how it affects us, this will logically lead to a heightened consciousness about how our produce is grown, what these animals are fed, how they are treated, and how it affects the larger environment. Paying attention to how much we eat or purchase may also help reduce waste or minimise our consumption of animal products, thus reducing our carbon footprint.

Finally, using our meal times to slow down and take a break from the rush of our everyday lives allows us to be more present with ourselves, helping us focus on what we’re doing in the moment. Sometimes we’re so absorbed with our jobs or whatever’s going on that we forget to just sit, breathe, and disconnect. With mindfulness, eating doesn’t have to be another task that we have to tick off from our never-ending to-do list.