Mindful Eating
As an intro to the new book I just received in the mail called “Mindful Eating” by Jan Chozen Bays, MD, I decided to write a little about mindfulness in general and also how it relates to eating.
“Mindfulness is deliberately paying attention, being fully aware of what is happening both inside yourself — in your body, heart, and mind — and outside yourself, in your environment. Mindfulness is awareness without judgment or criticism.”
This book focuses how the practice of mindfulness can restore our mental, emotional and physical balance as it relates to eating, because in the case of a great deal of people, many mental and emotional issues affect and work in tandem with our eating habits.
In learning how to truly pay attention to the process of preparing and consuming food, we begin to loosen our bad habits and unproductive emotional states that are associated with it.
As someone who has spent a good amount of time meditating and exploring mindfulness, I stand by this statement in the book:
“Mindfulness can transform boredom into curiosity, distressed restlessness into ease, and negativity into gratitude. Using mindfulness we will find that anything we bring our full attention to will begin to open up and reveal words we never suspect existed. In all my experience as a physician and a Zen teacher I have never found anything to equal it.”