Reachieve your healthy weight with Mindfulness
In a society dominated by fad diets and quick fixes for weight loss, the practice of mindful eating proposes a different approach: listening to your body, your sensations, and reconnecting with your real needs. Instead of counting calories or following strict dietary rules, mindful eating invites us to pay benevolent attention to our relationship with food. This article explores how listening to your true hunger sensations, recognizing satiety signals and satisfying the needs of your body, mind and heart can help you reachieve your healthy weight with mindfulness in a natural and sustainable way.
Awareness of true hunger: Jan Chozen Bays’ nine types of hunger
Jan Chozen Bays, pediatrician and meditation master, describes nine types of hunger that influence our relationship with food. Learning to identify these different hungers can help us make more conscious food choices, adapted to our real needs.
1. Eye hunger:
Our eyes can be drawn to the beauty of a well-presented dish or the bright colors of a food, triggering the urge to eat, even if our body isn’t really hungry.
2. Nose hunger:
The smell of food, such as freshly baked bread or coffee, can trigger an immediate urge to eat. Simply smelling something delicious can lead us to eat when we don’t need to.
3. Ear hunger:
The sound of food, such as the crunch of potato chips or the crunch of toast, can also stimulate the urge to eat.
4. Touch hunger:
Handling or holding food can trigger the desire to eat. For example, nibbling while cooking or sharing a dish with friends can activate this hunger.
5. Mouth hunger:
This is the sensory pleasure we derive from the texture and flavors of food. We sometimes seek to prolong this pleasure, even after satisfying our physiological hunger.
6. Stomach hunger:
The stomach sends hunger signals, often in the form of gurgling or empty sensations. However, these signals can also be misleading, influenced by our habits or perception of time (for example, eating because it’s “time”).
7. Cell hunger:
This is our body’s true hunger. It arises when our cells need specific nutrients to function properly. This hunger is often overlooked in favor of other, more superficial hungers.
8. Hunger of the mind:
The mind can drive us to eat because of beliefs, judgments or automatic thoughts. For example, the idea that we “deserve” a dessert after a long day’s work, or that we can’t waste food.
9. Heart hunger:
Emotions such as sadness, boredom, loneliness or anxiety can drive us to eat to fill an emotional void. Heart hunger is often linked to a search for comfort.
To regain a healthy weight, it’s essential to distinguish between these different types of hunger and learn to respond to those that are truly in line with our body’s needs, such as cell hunger, while learning to appease the others more consciously.
Satiety awareness: listening to your body’s signals
One of the fundamental principles of mindful eating is learning to recognize the satiety signals our body sends us. Our stomach and intestines play a key role in communicating with our brain to let us know when we’ve eaten enough. However, in our modern society, these signals are often ignored or stifled by eating habits dictated by stress, speed or cultural beliefs. We can reachieve our healthy weight with mindfulness.
1. The satiety process :
When we eat, receptors in the stomach send signals to the brain that the stomach is filling up. At the same time, hormones such as leptin and ghrelin regulate our feelings of hunger and satiety. However, these mechanisms can take a long time to kick in -about 20 minutes-, hence the importance of eating slowly and paying attention to our bodily sensations.
2. Signals of fullness :
For many of us, the habit is to eat until we feel full or our plate is empty. Ideally, however, we should stop eating at the first signs of satiety, which can include a slight reduction in the desire to eat, a feeling of lightness or simple comfort in the stomach.
3. The distraction trap:
Eating while watching TV, working or commuting can distract us from our body’s subtle signals. By practicing mindful eating, we can slow down, savor each bite and reconnect with the physical sensations of satiety, thus avoiding overeating.
Feeding your body, mind and heart: meeting your real needs
Mindful eating is not just about meeting our body’s physical needs, but also listening to what our head and heart need. To regain a healthy balance, it’s crucial to identify the true sources of our hunger and seek to nourish them appropriately.
Read also: The benefits of mindful eating
1. Nourish your body :
Our bodies need specific nutrients to function optimally. Instead of being influenced by restrictive diets or food trends, mindful eating encourages us to listen to our internal needs and choose foods that bring us energy and well-being.
2. Nourishing the mind:
Our thoughts and beliefs about food often influence our food choices. By practicing mindfulness, we can become more aware of these mental patterns and challenge them. For example, instead of eating to fill a need for comfort, we can find other ways to calm our minds, such as meditating, walking or sharing social activities.
3. Feed your heart:
Emotional hunger is a reality for many of us. Instead of seeking to soothe our emotions with food, mindful eating invites us to recognize and respond to them with compassion. This may mean taking care of ourselves through relaxation practices, asking loved ones for support, or simply giving ourselves a moment’s respite.
Presence and nutrient absorption
Being present to what we eat not only helps us to eat less and better, with more nutritious foods, but also increases our absorption of nutrients by around 40%. In this way, we can reachieve our healthy weight with mindfulness, without the need for demanding and frustrating diets.
Conclusion
Reachieve your healthy weight with mindful eating is a gentle, caring approach, based on listening to your true physical, mental and emotional needs. By learning to distinguish between different forms of hunger, to recognize your body’s signals of satiety, and to nourish your whole being, it becomes possible to rediscover a natural and lasting balance, far removed from restrictive diets and temporary solutions. It’s a path towards a more harmonious relationship with food and, by extension, with ourselves.
To find out more: Read the book Mindful eating by Jan-Chozen-Bays
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