Know Exactly What To Eat And When With This One Technique

Manifest the year of your dreams by going inward. Renew You 2017 is a month of mindfulness during which we’ll share content that guides you to create a deeply rooted intention for the new year. We’ll help you navigate inevitable obstacles with the latest science on habits, motivation, ritual, and more and equip you with tried-and-true techniques to outsmart even the toughest inner critic. 

While we are great at eating mindfully as infants, crying when we want food, pushing away food when we are full, this ability gets complicated as we age. It doesn't help that the diet advice for the past 20 or 30 years has told us must use "restraint" and "willpower" in order to achieve a certain look or a number on the scale. It's a mentality that leads to this conversation: "I want that chocolate chip cookie, but I shouldn't have it...it's so fattening…fine I'll just have one bite…oh no I just ate the whole thing! Now I feel terrible…and it wasn't even that good…why did I do that...now I will have to spend hours on the treadmill tomorrow…since I'm doing that, I may as well have these chips…." That kind of negative self-talk is not healthy for our minds or our bodies.

When we embrace mindful eating, the practice of slowing down and letting our bodies' cues guide our choices, we leave all that guilt and deprivation behind. Mindful eating is about understanding the nutritional makeup of food, identifying your body's language, fully savoring the experience of eating, and shedding all worry. Eating mindfully can help with weight loss/maintenance, eliminate digestive distress (such as gas, bloating, and bowel irregularities), and some evidence shows that it could even help with disordered eating and obesity.

Get familiar with your blood sugar levels, your real feelings of hunger and satiety, and listen to what the body wants. Inner wisdom requires serious work to calm and quiet the chatter of your mind and the actual noise around you. It takes episodes of overeating to truly understand what it feels like when we are full and when we are hungry.

Outer wisdom is knowing the nutritional makeup of a food, its calories (or food energy), its properties, and its flavors. When we know the general composition of the food, we can make better choices. For example, if dinner is in two hours and you're feeling very hungry, 200 to 300 calories (depending on your metabolism and physique) might help stabilize your blood sugar and keep you comfortable until dinner without ruining your appetite.

In the mindful eating philosophy, we believe there are no bad foods. Of course, there are foods that are more nutritious and foods that are less nutritious, but restricting any foods entirely only serves to make them more alluring. I, for instance, love French fries. But ever since I took off the restriction of "weekends only," I find I'm less intrigued. Plus, when I do have it, I'm less likely to binge on them.

If you choose to indulge, or eat more than you would have liked, don't guilt yourself. You will never ever be perfect at mindful eating. The goal is to embrace your decision and fully enjoy your food. Foods bring pleasure, even the ones you used to consider "bad." So once a choice is made, embrace it and enjoy it instead of ruining it with guilt after.

There isn't a person on the planet who can escape this. The goal is to make the relationship a happy one instead of one you have to fight three times a day.

With so many distractions and deceptive marketing practices, it's the place where both wholesome and destructive decisions begin.

Tip No. 1: Don't go hungry! Seriously, every time I go to the grocery store hungry I end up eating while I'm there and purchasing three times the amount of food I actually needed.