3 Strategies to Eat Mindfully Throughout the Holiday Season

The holidays offer a time for fun and fulfillment, yet they can be stressful, tiring and overwhelming at the same time. Maintaining mindful awareness throughout the season will help you remain connected to yourself, remain healthy and well while keeping any stress or emotional eating manageable and at bay.

During times of increased stress you become more likely to be in a rush and tired, which leads to making choices that are often rushed and favor convenience. This may cause an experience of not being fully present which can cause eating to feel like just one more thing on your to-do list. Rushing, not being present with your food and not choosing nourishment can cause the internal experience of stress to only become worse.

Mindful eating is paying attention to what you are eating while deriving pleasure and nourishment from your food. When you are eating mindfully, you enhance the experience of eating while acknowledging the opportunity to nourish your body and your mind. Mindful eating is paying attention to the sensory experience of your food.

Just the sight of the food you are about to eat begins the process of digestion. Mindful eating begins by taking in the visual elements and aromas of your food, before you even take one single bite! This mindful process enhances the experience of eating and pleasure of tasting your food.

The holiday season can trigger emotional and stress eating simply because of the stressed and rushed nature of the season. Additionally, this time of year more “comfort foods” tend to be always available and just about everywhere which can trigger the desire to eat irrespective of hunger. Cravings can be caused by just seeing or smelling food AND because of stress and emotional distress.

The three following strategies are intended to help maintain mindful eating throughout the holiday season in order to manage emotional and stress based cravings effectively. When you use these strategies you create an opportunity to be present with your food, to be engaged with eating in a mindful, calm and relaxed manner. This creates an opportunity to derive true pleasure and nourishment from your food, while at the same time reducing stress and emotional tension in general.

1.    Practice 1 minute of deep breathing before eating.

When you are breathing deeply and in a state of relaxation you are engaging the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the rest and digest mode, which is the mode we want to live in—unless of course there is a true emergency. Often when we are rushed or stressed during the holidays, we eat more quickly to get to the next thing on the to-do list. Try slowing down, and breathing deeply for one minute before you eat in order to calm your nervous system. This will allow your body to assimilate the nutrients from you food more effectively while also creating a sense of inner calm as you release stress and tension with your breath.

2.    Before you eat, set an intention to eat mindfully.

When you set any intention, you set in motion a powerful force that helps you focus. When you set your intention to eat mindfully before you take your first bite, you will be far more likely to do so. Setting an intention helps you create a sense of ritual and care for the process of eating and the nourishment and pleasure you will derive from your food. Try setting an intention to eat mindfully before you eat and notice how this simple practice can shift your awareness and sense of focus from your to-do list to the present moment.

3.    Practice gratitude before you eat.

After a bit of deep breathing and setting your intention to eat mindfully, offer gratitude for the food you are about to eat. When you express gratitude for your food, you create a space for deriving pleasure from your food in a big way. This can be a powerful practice to reduce stress and emotional eating as gratitude helps to alleviate stress and anxiety. When practicing gratitude for your food before you take a bite, recognize the preparation and the life giving nutrients in your food—as well as the pleasure you will experience by eating it. Be grateful and notice the impact of gratitude on your physical body as well as your mood state.

Try these three mindful strategies to remain present, focused and engaged as you make choices about what you eat and how you eat it this holiday season. Taking time to slow down, breathe, set an intention to eat mindfully and practice gratitude will allow for health and fulfillment throughout the entire holiday season.

Creating Your OWN Personalized Emotional Cravings Protocol

When you are working to heal emotional eating, having a personalized approach is most effective. The three step cravings protocol that I recommend, Pause, Reflect, Release, is helpful for most as a guideline. However, what you do within each phase will help you make it your own. When you have a personalized approach, it feels more authentic and doable and is far more likely to be sustainable.

When you find the tools that work for you, you want to practice them consistently. Awareness builds with effort and consistency. Self-awareness will continue to grow as you become more and more comfortable understanding and accepting your internal emotional world. I emphasize the acceptance process as it is absolutely vital to healing. When you understand the inner workings of your own mind, you create a tremendous capacity to heal, grow and accept yourself and others without judgment.

As you continue to more effectively manage your emotional food cravings, you create a sense of mastery which inevitably increases your experience of internal emotional comfort. When you no longer fear your feelings but instead understand, embrace and deeply accept them, you are essentially understanding, embracing and deeply accepting yourself.

The process of making peace with food is the process of making peace with yourself. With emotional, stress and disordered eating, it is never actually about the food, it is more about a limited acceptance of yourself and a limited ability to connect with yourself in a meaningful way. When you place conditions in order to accept yourself completely, you leave yourself open to creating negative cognitions about yourself such as feeling not good enough, inadequate or as though you have to be perfect.

These negative cognitions are not useful, generally untrue and hold you back from knowing yourself and caring for yourself. When you are not caring for yourself and believing the negative cognitions as if they are true, you will most likely lack motivation. As you become more emotionally aware you build confidence, you are able to believe in yourself and your capability to feel strong and healthy. Releasing the old negative cognitions and subsequent thought patterns is essential.

As you work with your own personal emotional cravings protocol, you will feel empowered in the moment, you get to choose how to manage a specific emotional craving. As you build your determination to use your protocol consistently, you will strengthen your mindset and make the best choice possible in the moment.

When you think about the three specific steps, Pause, Reflect, Release and creating a personalized protocol that works for you, it is helpful to know the specific element of each that you find to be useful.

Within the Pause phase, what helps you Pause? Do you prefer to set a timer for 1-5 minutes in the moment of awareness that you are mindlessly or emotionally eating? What is helpful next? Have a glass of water and wait for the timer to go off? Do a deep breathing exercise? Determining the specifics of your pause that work for you will help you personalize each step into a useful, actionable tool for managing your food cravings. Once you establish the technique that works best for you, use it consistently in order to effectively utilize the Pause phase.

During the Reflection phase, what works most effectively for you to Reflect on your emotional experience? What proactive element can you incorporate to make this Reflection time useful and effective? Is it helpful for you to talk about your emotion? Do you prefer to write in a journal? Does taking a walk and pondering your emotions help? Do you need to take some space away from the emotion first and practice mindfulness or relaxation and then take time to reflect?

Find what reflective process works for you and helps you identify the why behind your emotion. Once you Reflect you can take time to make a choice on how to respond to the specific emotion. If something needs to be done, decide when you will take action on it.

As you move into the Release phase, determine what helps you Release and let go of emotions that are no longer serving you. Does deep breathing help you? You can breathe in and imagine peace and contentment flowing in, and breathe out, imagining all that is not serving you mentally, emotionally and physically releasing. Does journaling support your releasing process? Does mindfulness and/or visualization help?

To visualize the Release, you can imagine your emotions on a cloud—drifting away in the sky—or your emotions releasing with the imagery of leaves floating past you on a river. Whatever helps you internalize the experience of letting go, that is what will be most effective for you to do during this phase of Release.

Take time to write down your process and know it may be different for different emotional experiences. Write down what you will do to create a personalized Pause, Reflect and Release. Have these steps nearby so you can access them in times that it may not initially come naturally for you. The rest is practice and time, time and practice. Practice is the only way to integrate the process and make it work for you within your life.  

Did you come up with a creative Pause Reflect and Release? Let me know! I’d love to hear how you are implementing these tools. How are they working for you? Need support? Know that I am here to help support you along your journey to making peace with food as well as with yourself.

How to Pause and Listen to Your Body: Integrating Mindful and Intuitive Eating

Learning to pause and listen to your body is one of the most profound ways to heal your relationship with food. Connecting with the present moment by being mindful and intuitively aware of your body is healing. We often spend a good bit of time lost in thought, mindlessly rushing from one aspect of the day to the next which often results in mindlessly eating.

When was the last time you found yourself looking in the cabinet and yet you weren’t really hungry or finishing a bag of chips and wondering how you got there in the first place? These things happen, and when you struggle with emotional and stress eating, it can become a mindless action used to avoid or suppress emotions and stress. When you engage in mindless eating to ease stress or numb out emotions it may lead to forming habit pattern of mindless eating.

This is where learning to Pause and check in with your body and mind can be such a powerful action to take along your path to making peace with food. When you Pause, you begin to engage with the present moment as it is right now. When you Pause, you are respecting your body, your needs and tuning into your intuition.

Within the space of the Pause, you create an opportunity to make a choice. This is where the power lies when you become mindfully engaged with the present moment. In the present moment you can check in with how stress or your emotions are impacting your mind, your body, your energy, your mood and your choices. When truly present, you can ask yourself how you want to feel and make choices based on this—rather than on avoidance and fear of feeling your feelings.

If you have been reading here for some time, you most likely already know the definition of mindfulness. However, I am going to repeat it, because it is so useful to have the reminder. Mindfulness is paying attention from moment to moment with nonjudgmental awareness. The non-judgment part is often one of the biggest challenges. Our minds judge by nature and create conditions that can feel pressured or uncomfortable.

When you engage with the Pause in the moment of a craving or when you catch yourself mindlessly eating or avoiding emotions and stress, you are essentially practicing mindfulness. When you use the moment of Pause and make a different choice based on how you want to feel, you are growing your mindfulness muscles (so to speak) to create more strength, awareness and comfort internally.

Now that you have allowed yourself to Pause, you can create and build self-awareness. Taking time to ask yourself, “What is happening right now?” “Why am I stressed?” “Why is this emotion I seem to want to avoid through food here in the first place?” “Is there another choice I can make in this moment?” These questions lead to self-awareness, growth and the opportunity to heal your relationship with food and with yourself.

When you allow yourself to be curious about your emotions and behaviors you create the perspective of non-judgment. You can be kind and compassionate to yourself, which will be far more tolerated internally than being mean and judgmental towards yourself! When you become overly judgmental towards yourself, you are more likely to emotionally eat, regress and feel shameful or like a failure. When you are kind to yourself you are more likely to grow, to push through the challenges and create the change you want.

Once you have examined the pause in a mindful manner, you have an opportunity to make a choice. What else can you do in this moment? Here you might opt to set a timer for 5 minutes and have a glass of water. You might choose to practice deep breathing or remove yourself from the kitchen, food item, cabinets, whatever is causing the mindless eating and cravings.

If you struggle with emotional eating, you may struggle to connect to your intuition. You may feel a sense of being disconnected from your body and your gut feelings. When you take the time to Pause, and examine the space within the pause, you will get back in touch and connect with your intuition and inner knowing.

When you Pause you can observe what is happening internally. Is there something your intuition is trying to communicate to you? Be curious and open to listening to your inner wisdom. Learn to become accepting of your emotions, internal experiences and inner guidance. Learn to listen and you might be surprise by what you “hear.”

Try this practice the next time you are experiencing a craving or you find that you are mindlessly eating/grazing/staring at the fridge: take time to Pause. As you Pause, look within and tune into your intuition. Ask yourself what you are truly needing and see if you can offer that to yourself within that very moment. Your body and mind are intimately interconnected and practicing this Pause will encourage and strengthen this internal connection.