Let’s Understand “What is Mindful Eating?”
In my mindful eating workshops, I guide a group of people to mindfully pick an orange right from the tree, where they have a chance to connect to their food source and I guide them through a mindful eating process.
It sounds incredibly simple, yet after going through this mindful practice, many comments are made along the lines of “I can’t believe I’d never really tasted an orange before!” or “This practice has shown me that eating is indeed a very spiritual practice.” or “I can really see now how often I eat when I’m not hungry.”
It’s amazing to see how this process can truly alter our relationship to food because it allows us to address our relationship to food and to eating at its source.
My R.E.A.L Food Approach Towards Mindful Eating
I developed The R.E.A.L Food Approach to Mindful Eating as a way to quickly and easily adopt a mindful approach to eating. Besides R.E.A.L referring to eating real food – one of my most important guidelines to healthy nutrition, it also stands for:
- Relax
- Evaluate
- Awareness
- Loving-Kindness
I can’t promise you that this practice will always be pleasant or easy. Sometimes it might be quite challenging and uncomfortable as we start to expose and uncover some underlying emotions or habitual patterns that we may have been stuffing down with food.
If you stay committed to incorporating this mindful approach into the everyday reality of your life, I promise you, you will notice a huge difference in the way you relate to food, to your body and to the Earth and connect to these aspects in your life as the miracles that they are.
Think of the R.E.A.L Food Approach as a mindful technique that acts as little speed bump to eating. It allows you to wedge a moment of pause between you and your food, so that you can insert conscious choice into the equation.
This practice will help ground you in mindful awareness, slow you down and settle you into the present moment of the eating process instead of just habitually and unconsciously digging in. Sometimes mindful eating exercise or exercises could also help in getting peace of mind.
R.E.A.L Approach Stands For
I will break down the R.E.A.L into 4 separate posts, focusing in on each part individually. I invite you to go through this mindful eating practice, and although not crucial, I highly recommend going in sequential order, as that is how the R.E.A.L Food Approach to Mindful Eating was initially designed – to take you from start to finish.
R stands for Relax
E stands for Evaluate
A stands for Awareness
L stands for Loving-Kindness
May this mindful eating practice be of some benefit to you, and may this benefit have far-reaching consequences in your life and the lives you touch. In this way, any beneficial practice that we incorporate can help countless of thousands of people.
