Mindfulness and Eating: The Art of Awareness, Pt 1

Being PRESENT by being mindful can drastically improve your health, your life, your weight, and your feelings of satisfaction.  How, what, when, and why we eat as well as what we think and do, directly affects our health, our moods, and our experiences.  Being present puts us in contact with the creative force of life, rather than reactivity, and offers us the key to living a healthy, satisfying life.  Mindful eating is one efficient vehicle that leads us to the present.

Imagine this, when we learned to eat, we were preverbal!  Infants!  Our food started out as liquid when we learned to manage the muscles of our tongues and control what we could swallow.  One of our first accomplishments was managing an uncertain quantity of liquid, and not choking… YAY!

Next came blended foods.  We had to recalibrate our tongues to stop pushing forward, then backward while rooting on the nipple or bottle, and now push up on the roof of our mouths to guide the soft food to the back of our throats, instead of all over our lips and down our chin.

When soft foods were introduced to our tiny little growing bodies, bananas, cooked squash, avocado, creamy cereals, our strong tongues pressed up against the roof of our mouths, but we also intuitively mashed food between our gums.  We didn’t even have teeth yet, but nature gave us this impulse.  When the teeth came, we were told to chew our food as the food become harder and denser. That was about the extent of our chewing lessons.  This amazing progression of chewing came through impulse, and most of us are still chewing the same exact way we did when we were toddlers.

The grinding ability of our teeth through pressure and movement is the first place that fuel is assimilated in our bodies.  Our saliva secretes amylase, an enzyme that begins the digestion of carbohydrates.  The longer our food is chewed and the closer to a “paste” that we can chew, the smaller the food particles we can digest and more easily assimilate.

Most of us, in our fast paced lifestyles, are eating too quickly – on the go, in the car, between tasks, and with too many distracting thoughts or in front of the television.  Sometimes we eat when we are mad, afraid, or lonely.  The thoughts we think while we eat activate different chemicals in our bodies that help or hinder the digestive process.  Fear and stress release cortisol, the “fight or flight” hormone that is released when we perceive that we are in danger.

It slows down our digestive system and our food remains in our stomach longer and therefore isn’t digested quickly or easily.  In many cases, our bodies convert our food into fat to preserve it as back up fuel until after the “emergency” is over.  More importantly, the energy or environment that we eat our food in is the energy we are feeding ourselves.  Wouldn’t we rather eat love and relaxation, rather than fear, stress or hurry?  You can prepare the body to accept food in a relaxed way and digest efficiently.

Breathing and relaxing techniques are designed to increase presence and relaxation, which reduces cortisol and increases the release of calming, healing chemicals in the body.  Serotonin is one neurotransmitter that is released during relaxation that aids in the smooth muscle contractions of the intestines and increases our sense of joy and well-being.  Serotonin is know as the “happy hormone” even though it isn’t a hormone at all.  Beyond chemicals, our present attention is one of the few things we do have control over, our inner environment.  We can control that with the thoughts we think.  Think love!  Think Gratitude!

Many of us are consciously looking for ways to practice mindfulness, but our young, fast paced generation needs help with their mindfulness as well.  We can teach our children to chew by sharing mindful eating techniques.  Our school system’s limited schedules are unable to provide students with enough time to get to a lunch table, and get all their food in their mouths before the bell rings.   Giving our children a reminder to take a breath and be present while eating will encourage them to slow down and chew well while creating good habits for their future.

Techniques to help us become PRESENT are practiced all over the world.  Most humans get knocked off center by the multitude of tasks and responsibilities, thoughts and fears that crowd our days and throw us into stress and survival.  Practicing mindfulness helps us to harness the moment, which is the only place that we can use our power.  The present is where all our needs are met and where we are safe, and breathing.

Eating is one of our few basic primal needs for existence on this planet, and we love our food.  Now, we not only get to be nourished by the nutrients in our food, but also by the joy of experiencing it mindfully and in a “present” that is exploding in flavor.

Written by Jo Sutton: http://www.jo-esutton.com/