Lisa Jones, a clinical dietitian at Irwin Army Community Hospital, explains what happens when we eat mindlessly. Some eating problems can be attributed to mindlessness in our selection and consumption of food. But if we turn our attention to our senses in choosing to eat food that is both satisfying and nourishing to our body, if we acknowledge our responses to the food, and if we become aware of physical hunger and satiety cues, we might develop a new habit of eating that can have positive results.

Subscribe to Dr. Justin Imel, Sr. by Email
00:00:03,640 –> 00:00:06,770 So I remember a study being done where, um, a bunch of people went to a movie theater, sat down and right before the movie started, they gave everybody huge buckets of popcorn. At the end of the movie, they look to see, and the majority of the people had eaten all of their popcorn. The kicker is the popcorn was stale and it didn’t even taste good. So, they mindlessly eight through that popcorn because they weren’t paying attention to the taste or anything like that while they were watching the movie. Really, that says to us that we don’t pay attention to our body were not listening. Does it taste good? Does it smell good? Am I even hungry? So, when we eat mindlessly, we learn to just ignore everything about what we’re eating about our body. We tend to eat too quickly, and we over consume. I eat mindlessly myself. Sometimes I have to catch myself. Oftentimes, people eat for emotional hunger, not necessarily physical hunger. When we eat for our emotions, then we’re not paying attention to what we’re eating, and we’re trying to cure or fix the emotion and not necessarily eating for sustenance or to maintain health. So mindfully eating really is just paying attention to what you’re eating to your cravings, to your physical accused and really being in the moment of eating that meal or that snack is really being in the moment of eating and not distracted. Picture yourself getting ready to have dinner. You want to shut off the TV computer, the radio. You want to sit in a quiet room, and you really want to ask yourself, Am I hungry? How much do I need to eat? Does the food taste good? Oftentimes, people eat so quickly they don’t even know if the meal was good. So, we have to really pay attention and remove those distractions. Think about the taste, the color, the texture. Does it taste good? Is it too hot? Things like that. We really want to make sure that we’re tuned into the food and our body while we’re eating a lot of soldiers that I see myself included. I eat fast to this day. I try to really slow myself down, but when we eat quickly, we often eat too much because it takes about 20 minutes for our mind and body to get on our stomach in our body to get on the same sheet of music. So, our stomach, maybe physically, full. But if we’ve eaten the whole meal in five minutes and we eat another, say a piece of pizza on top of that after that 20-minute window, when our brain knows we’re full, we’re overly full. So, if we eat mindfully, we tend to eat slower, enjoy and appreciate our food, and we stop when we’re no longer hungry instead of stopping when we’re full. On average, it takes about 20 minutes so you can physically have a full stomach. But you don’t really know it. So, I when I teach classes, I always talk about like Thanksgiving. You eat your big meal. You know you’re a little bit full, but you can still eat a little bit more. So, you go get that piece of pie and then after you eat the pie about 20 minutes later, you’re feeling miserable because you’ve overeaten. If we eat really fast that we don’t give our minds or a belly that 20 minutes to actually communicate with each other, So a good 20 minutes is why we want to stretch our meal out to that 20 minutes. People tend to eat a meal in five or 10. We need to stretch it out to about 20 minutes so that our brain says, Hey, okay, that’s enough emotional eating versus while we have emotional eating and environmental eating. Sometimes we eat for our environment triggers from our environment. For example, if someone if I’m in my office and I’m just going about my day and somebody brings in fresh baked chocolate chip cookies and put some right in front of me. I wasn’t thinking about a cookie prior to them walking in, but now that they’re there and these cookies are in front of me, that’s what I’m going to be tempted to grab one and eat it regardless of how my stomach feels. So, we have to kind of get away from the environmental impacts with eating, Uh, and then the emotional impacts again. If we’re stressed or you know we’re tired or cranky or angry or sad or bored, we typically tend to eat. So, we have to kind of learn if we’re mindfully eating, we learn to give that space between the trick, the trigger and actually acting upon that trigger. So, if we have time and realize, Okay, I’m not really hungry, but I’m kind of stressed out. Ask yourself, Should I be eating? Am I hungry? If not, then that trigger needs to be dealt with in a different way. I think when you go to a movie, it’s sometimes for the yummy popcorn, and I love popcorn myself. So, what I do because I’m going to have popcorn when I go to the movie 90% of the time, I’ll get a small like a little Children’s pack that has a little bit of popcorn, a small beverage and maybe a little fruit snack or something with it. And then that way, if I eat all the popcorn, I don’t feel bad about it, and I’m only gonna eat what I have. And that’s the ticket, because when you think about that study that we talked about earlier, those people were given large amounts of popcorn, so they ate large amounts of popcorn. Had they been had they been given a smaller bag of popcorn, they would have eaten a smaller amount. I wouldn’t say it’s a diet, because a diet is something that you go on. Okay, so if somebody says I really need to go on a diet or I’m on a diet to me that says you’ve changed your eating habits to be restrictive and whenever you go on something, you have to go off of it. So, to me, diets aren’t necessarily effective or long term success. Success? I would say mindful eating is more of a habit and a way of eating, not necessarily a diet that you would go on. We need to stay off of our phones when we’re eating. Oftentimes eating becomes automatic and it should not be automatic. It should be intentional. You’re not eating with attention if you’re, attention is on your phone. So, you have to eat with intention. I’m intentionally eating. I want to fuel my body, and then I’m gonna go check my voice mails or my emails on my phone. I do have a lot of people that come in, and they’re, like, upset that they’re they’re or they just come in and say, I don’t I don’t know why I’m here. My doctor just told me I had to come. And then typically, by the end of the appointment, they’re glad that they came in. So, I think there’s a misconception that dieticians are judging. Uh, and I really pride myself on not being judgy because I like to eat everything everybody else likes to eat. Um, and I never tell them they can’t have a food. I just tell them what they need to have first. So, they need to have, you know, fruits and vegetables and grains, lean meat and dairy for every meal. After they eat that, then they can have a few chips or a small cupcake or something like that. It really is all about meeting your nutrient needs instead of just restricting yourself.