Is Mindful Eating In The Cards For You?

Is Mindful Eating In The Cards For You?

We all know expensive diets that involve buying special foods, drinking shakes or counting points don’t work. So what’s the alternative? Mindful eating is proving to be a breakthrough approach for women who are ready to end the dieting cycle. Here’s why:

Restrictive Diets Don’t Work

Most weight reduction diets work by restricting what you eat and how much. It’s an all or nothing game where success is predicated exclusively on sustained self-discipline. Not surprising, the failure rate of this approach is painfully high. This is because restrictive diets offer little insight into the eating behaviors that undermine your best efforts to lose weight. In the end, betting the weight management farm on will power never ends well.

Why Mindful Eating?

First and foremost, mindful eating is not a diet. It doesn’t restrict what or how much you eat. Rather, it works by reshaping your eating behaviors with effective strategies that help you find more enjoyment in food and, as important, to need less of it. It is all about paying attention.

Mindful eating starts with learning how to pay attention to the look, feel, smell and taste of the food you are eating. This appreciative focus on what you are eating slowly shifts you away from distracted, autopilot consumption that blocks signals from your brain sensing fullness.

One of the most important benefits of mindful eating is that it repairs the fullness feedback loop, which is the primary dysfunction of all overeating behaviors. It does this without resorting to all or nothing tactics. With mindful eating there are no failures and the accompanying guilt and regret. Getting off track is accepted as part of the process for gaining insight and fine-tune management of self-defeating eating behaviors. You accept and learn from all your eating experiences and move on. It’s all about progress instead of perfection.

Not surprising, mindful eating begins to shut down your negative inner critic. The hopeless goal of superhuman will power is replaced with a kind and useful curiosity to ask what just happened here? What triggered the mindless eating? What can I learn for it? In this way, mindful eating allows you to leverage setbacks into new ways to choose differently the next time you eat.

This ability to slow down and gain clarity from the moment is a key feature of this approach. Eating slower, savoring the taste and texture of food, only eating until full, and eating more whole and less processed food represents a powerful shift in eating habits. By themselves, they can help women better maintain or lose weight

In my coaching practice, I have had several women get to their target weight using mindful eating. What is truly remarkable is that they have been able to maintain their weight loss over several years.

Each mindful eating principle is one of a series of building blocks that influences new eating behaviors. Most clients who are successful enter a regular coaching relationship. Accountability and acknowledgment of the client’s progress is an important part of mindful eating coaching.

A good way to learn more about mindful eating is a unique resource I have created for women called Mindful Eating Cards.

Mindful Eating Cards

The Mindful Eating Cards are a deck of sixteen coaching cards that capture the wisdom of mindful eating philosophy integrated with self-coaching strategies. This unique resource is an ideal “starter kit” for anyone thinking about beginning a mindful eating program.

Each card in the deck represents a key principle mindful eating. These include a mindful approach to food shopping, meal planning and eating environment. They also include new eating behaviors to help you slow down and increase the enjoyment of food. This critical pause rewires the brain to take pleasure in better food choices, to become more aware of the feeling of fullness and take time to check in with the body after eating.

Order Mindful Eating Cards Here 

With daily use of the cards, you will start to integrate new food behaviors with every meal. Written in a positive and nonjudgmental style, the cards promote a new pride about changing eating habits and reshaping your relationship with food.

The front sides of the cards have images carefully chosen to symbolize and enhance mindful eating goals. The backsides of the cards have a clear and concise summary of mindful eating principles. As important for success, the deck is designed to travel. Always take them with you to manage eating behaviors in any situation.

Most women using Mindful Eating Cards focus on a different card every day. This daily use of mindful eating principles provides the seeds for success. With time and consistency, the strategies become new eating habits that gradually change your relationship with food. Overeating cross dissolves into mindful eating, a welcome shift in the balance of power food has over your life and well being.

Order Mindful Eating Cards Here