I’m glad you ask! Mindfulness (quite simply, paying more attention to the present moment, in yourself and your surroundings) can have two interlinking factors when it comes to thinking about food: helping us have a good mental relationship with what we eat, for example to prevent or aid recovery from eating disorders, and connecting to the idea of where our food comes from. Thinking about the production and effort that goes into our food can help us to appreciate it more, that connection forming a better mental attitude towards it.

Why be mindful?

Mindfulness has a real effect on mental and physical health. It can help us to appreciate and enjoy our food more, but also to decide what to eat and when through thinking about what our bodies want; our food decisions are often determined by , for example, emotion, habit or convenience, which can have an overall detrimental effect on our health.

Mindfulness can help us alleviate some of the problems we have with our bodies in a positive way. Take an example of weight loss: instead of action being tied to negative emotions attached to body image, the connection to our body’s needs that we approach through mindfulness can help us lose weight but, often more importantly, improve body image through appreciating what those bodies do.

Mindfulness helps us get the right nutrition, portion sizes, and a better relationship with food.

Nutrition and mental health

This small section concerns how what we put into our bodies affect our brains.

Recommendation from Lancet suggests that our diet should contain half fruit and veg, low added sugars (white), and more plant than animal protein (pale green)

The norm for today is a diet containing lots of sugar, processed foods, meat, dairy, and not a lot of veg (the Modern America Diet exemplifying this). Research has shown that diet can have a big effect on mental as well as physical health, the helpful and harmful things going into our bodies.

For example:

-One study showed alleviation in symptoms of depression in a third of participants that changed their diets to more fruit and veg, lean protein, less sugar and processed foods versus only 8% that didn’t (BMC Medicine, Jan ’17)

–Research has shown a link between deficiency in the Omega-3 fatty acid and depression. Omega-3 intake has decreased globally in the past century.

–One study showed that more than a quarter of severely depressed old women were deficient in the vitamin B-12.

A lot of this information is still quite cutting edge, but shows a definite and sensible connection between food and mind. It makes sense: if we put nutrients into our body that can be used for good, rather than the ’empty calories’ and chemicals in a lot of processed foods, our bodies and thus our minds will be able to function better.

Tips for being mindful

  1. Eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full. This involves taking small moments to realise what your body wants and when, preventing, for example, eating by emotion when the type and amount food eaten can actually end up making moods worse.
  2. Appreciate your food
    1. Sensations. Eat slowly: Notice how the food looks, smells, feels and tastes. Notice your breathing and how your body feels while eating.
    2. Appreciate its production. Take a minute too look at what’s in front of you and think about where it came from, who might have grown it, the effort that has gone into getting it to you!
      • At the dinner table, you could each pick an item on the plate and create a story about how it got there – factual or with some freedom of imagination…
  3. Try to keep up with those family meal times. This combines togetherness and un-distracted eating – with increasing societal tendency to eat mindlessly, on the go, or while doing something else, it’s important to continue setting aside time to eat and only eat.