If you want to watch out for your diet, you have to practice mindful and healthy eating or snacking. Being mindful simply means having more awareness of the type of food you eat and how much you consume which prevents you from eating much more than you need.
To help you get started in practicing mindful and healthy snacking, here are 5 tips you can jumpstart today:
Ask yourself
When you feel like you’re hungry, don’t dive right away into your fridge and open a bag of snacks. Ask yourself first, ‘How hungry do you think you are?” It may sound a little funny but asking yourself this question is essential because you want to make sure that you are not just feeling tired or bored. Oftentimes, we eat or snack more than we need to because we just feel bored, tired, or emotional and we don’t want that as that can cause us to do more binge eating or emotional eating.
Again, ask yourself.
One little hack you can do to check if you really need a snack is when you feel hungry drink a glass of water first. If after 5 minutes or so and you still feel the same, then it’s time to grab a snack.
Get rid of unhealthy snack
One of the reasons why people snack on unhealthy foods is because they are readily available for you anywhere and you can easily stock them up in your fridge or pantry.
And most probably, you’re still eating these unhealthy snacks because you still have them in your house.
So, what you can do?
Get rid of all unhealthy snacks you have in your fridge or pantry and the next time you go to the grocery, make healthy and mindful choices.
Prepare healthy snacks ahead of time
Aside from readily available healthy snacks in the market such as nuts, yogurt, and dried fruits, you can prepare your healthy snacks at home ahead of time.
Cut up your fruits and veggies ahead of time and put them in zip locks and store them in your fridge you can either eat them straight or pop them in your blender for a quick smoothie recipe. You can also bake healthy cookies ahead of time and store them in jars.
The key is to make healthy snacks available to you when you need them so you don’t fall off and eat unhealthy snacks again just because you can find healthy snacks when you need them.
Eat in moderation
Having healthy snacks doesn’t mean you can eat as much as you can, you still have to eat in moderation.
To eat in moderation, you have only to eat portions of your snacks that are enough for you to consume.
Don’t eat fast too as that will take away your awareness of how much you’re eating.
As much as you can, eat slowly and chew every bit of it. Give yourself time to really savor what you eating as that will help you to stay mindful. The more mindful you are when snacking, the more you feel satisfied with what you’ve eaten and the less you look for snacks.
Eat with no distraction
Distractions are everywhere. It could be your TV, phone, emails, noise around the house or the workplace, etc. But to practice mindful eating, you have to eat with fewer distractions as much as possible as you want to be fully aware of what you’re doing, the food you’re eating, and how much you have been eating.
As much as possible, do not snack in front of the TV, or while browsing the internet, or checking emails, and doing other stuff like that can cause you to lose awareness and eat much more than you actually need.
Practicing mindful eating does not take overnight. Yes, it does take time. But with consistent practice, you will do yourself the biggest favor ever to stay healthy and stay on track with your diet.