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Mindful Eating
Virtually in Marietta, GA and Serving Clients Virtually Nationwide
What is Mindful Eating?
Mindful eating is a term coined from mindfulness practices that date back over 2,500 years ago in Buddhist traditions. Mindful eating encourages you to focus on how you eat and how food feels in your body rather than what or how much you eat. Mindful eating incorporates a mindfulness approach that includes paying attention to hunger and fullness, emotions, and other cues from your body to determine what you need in the moment.
The diet industry makes us believe health is about control and that we must control our food intake and appearance through rules and restrictions. In turn, this goes against a mindfulness framework within our bodies as it challenges the natural interoceptive cues that our bodies use to communicate with us.
Mindfulness is widely used in nutrition counseling, eating disorder recovery, intuitive eating frameworks, in behavioral health treatment, and for chronic disease care. Mindfulness is aligned with Health at Every Size, trauma-informed care, and non-diet approaches in counseling. While some people may notice a change in weight, that is not the goal or focus of mindful eating. And research shows the benefits of adding mindfulness practices into your routine, one comprehensive review found that mindfulness interventions were effective in reducing binge eating, emotional eating, and external eating cues across multiple studies.
The benefits of mindfulness in eating disorder recovery
Registered dietitians commonly use mindfulness techniques to help support those with metabolic conditions and those with eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge eating disorder. When struggling with an eating disorder, an individual may lose that mindful connection to their body. This makes it common during recovery for interoceptive cues to feel unsafe or distorted while in treatment. Utilizing mindfulness tools and skills can help you reduce the challenges with facing hard emotions and stress that is driven by eating during recovery.
The connection between mindfulness and nervous system regulation
The nervous system is your body’s communication and control network that connects signals between the body and brain and helps sense and respond in situations. Eating disorders commonly cause our nervous system to be dysregulated and push us out of our window of tolerance.
Eating disorder behaviors like restriction, food rules, binge eating, purging, and obsessive thoughts are some examples that cause us to be hyper aroused and engages our sympathetic nervous system. Eating disorder behaviors like dissociation around meals, disconnection from hunger/fullness cues, only wanting highly palatable foods engages our dorsal system. Understanding where we are in our nervous system helps us understand how to guide ourselves into a regulated space, the window of tolerance.
The connection between mindfulness and nervous system regulation helps us foster a positive connection with our body and its interoceptive cues. Which is why we use a mindfulness framework in sessions to help our clients to build trust and heal their relationships to their bodies.
Our work with mindfulness
As dietitians who specialize in eating disorders, mindfulness techniques are something that we use often when working with our clients and see the benefits to help them regulate their nervous systems and make progress with recovery. Mindful eating helps challenge the eating disorder and build a sustainable relationship with food and body.
Yoga and mindfulness
Yoga is something we offer through our practice to help support eating disorder recovery and has an impactful connection to mindfulness. Yoga can help build back that mind and body connection, strengthen interoception, and aid emotional regulation and coping, all that eating disorders often cause disconnect within our bodies.
Let us help you foster a mindfulness routine that supports your life and values
If you are interested in learning more about how we incorporate mindful eating into our practice, complete our contact form and then we will set up a 15- to 20-minute free discovery call to make sure we are the right fit and then potentially schedule your initial session to start your healing journey.
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Serving Clients Virtually Nationwide
1225 Johnson Ferry Rd # 170,
Marietta, GA 30068, United States