5 Habits To Eat With Conscience

To eat with conscience, it's required to turn our attention to eating habits, more than that is to control the thoughts and emotions associated with ingestion. The fact of structuring a diet with intelligence will allow you to enjoy much more of the meals and break any kind of relationship they may have with anxiety and stress.

To achieve this, pay attention to the signs of hunger that the body sends you. Eat with conscience, leaving aside negative thoughts that may invite you to go to the pantry when it doesn't correspond.

Let's think that emotions influence what and how we eat. Therefore, we recommend you to be aware of this moment, since a conscious diet is based on eating with attention and intention, in order to notice and enjoy food, as well as being consistent with the effects of food on the body.

In fact, a study conducted by The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition suggests that being distracted or not paying attention to the act of eating tends to cause people to eat more during meals. This confirms that conscious feeding can help you lose weight. So, if you're worried about your weight, paying more attention to what you eat could help you control the amount of calories you eat.

Eat with conscience: 5 habits

These are some habits that will allow you to eat with conscience. Keep in mind that it's not about carrying out a strict diet, it's only to maintain a control of the sensations you have when you eat.

1. Listen to your body

Often, we listen to our minds first, but like many mindfulness practices, we can discover when is the ideal time to eat if we keep communication channels open with our body.

In that sense, we suggest that instead of only eating when you receive emotional signals, which may be different for each of us, whether stress, sadness, frustration, loneliness or simply boredom, that you listen to your body before doing so. Does your stomach growl, do you have little energy or do you feel a little dazed?

The true conscious feeding is actually the one that is connected to the body through the hunger signals that the organism throws.  You should know that mindfulness applied to food is a great help to recognize behavioral patterns while paying attention to the bodily signals associated with hunger and fullness.

2. Plan meals in advance

Preparing meals in advance can also help reduce nonsense feeding. Instead of preparing a meal at the last minute, you can plan a meal for yourself, your family or friends that covers all the food groups.

Planning regular meals help give the body a constant feeding rhythm. We recommend you don't eat fast, try to eat slowly. This will allow the body to process everything that is inside you and taste the food much more.

Certainly, the dishes shouldn't be very elaborate. The key is to incorporate a variety of nutrients and textures. Remember to enjoy every bite!

"Hunger often produces immortal poems. Abundance, only indigestion, and clumsiness. 

-Hippolyte Taine"

3. Sit down and enjoy the food

If this seems like a simple suggestion that you shouldn't even have to mention, think about how many times you eat while you're walking around the kitchen or turning your attention to another activity.

Therefore, we suggest that you establish as a general rule to do nothing but eat when the time comes. Thus, try to eat without the presence of distractors.

4. Try to identify each ingredient

Seeking to try and identify all the different ingredients in the food is another great way to focus on the present moment and eat with awareness.

Also, concentrate on all the flavors you have in your mouth and how they interact with each other, in addition to the smells and textures. This will benefit you twice: on the one hand, it will help you to appreciate the food and, on the other, to eat more slowly. An additional advantage of this technique is that it can also help you to be more creative in the kitchen.

Therefore, we recommend trying to identify each ingredient when you go to the restaurants. It can be a very fun challenge when you aren't the one who has made the food.

5. Eat slowly

The last habit we suggest you to eat with conscience is to eat slowly. Keep in mind that, among other benefits, it causes you to eat much less during meals.

Absolutely, this happens because the brain needs time to record that you are eating and to communicate with your body when it's full. In fact, it takes the brain about 20 minutes to know that it has already eaten enough.

So we recommend you eat slowly and listen to your body when you are already satisfied. To make this possible, you can take advantage of conversations in case you are eating with friends or family.

In conclusion, we are convinced that if you apply our eating habits with awareness, you will notice how you reduce stress levels, favor digestion levels, weight control and the amount you eat in any of your meals.