Act:

Savour your food.

Be it a meal or a snack, simple sustenance or indulgent experience, take a moment to give your food and body the attention they deserve. Truly experience what you are eating.

Reflect:

This is the essence of mindful eating. It doesn’t need to take any extra time — just attention. How does your food look? smell? sound? feel? taste? How does your body before, during, and after eating? What’s your emotional state?

Can you dig in and really savour your food?

One of the things that I love about this process is that it challenges some deeply held beliefs about eating. Here’s one:

“Emotional eating is bad.”

Is it really?

Eating for emotional reasons is a coping strategy. Food brings us comfort. It gives us energy. Eating can distract us. It is a perfectly legitimate coping strategy and sometimes is the very best thing that you could do.

I will always defend emotional eating.

Of course, like any coping strategy, there are times when it isn’t the ideal choice, but it can still be the best available choice. The solution isn’t to stop emotionally eating.

The solution is to build your toolbox so you have other options.

Today, though, just give yourself permission to enjoy your food.

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