8 Ways to Eat Mindfully and Healthfully

What are your eating habits? Eating is fundamental, and while we all need to eat to survive, each of us eats differently. So what’s the best way to eat to have a healthy body, mind, and spirit?

Here are 8 mindful eating habits for better digestion, clearer energy, and a stronger character:

1. Observe Your Eating Habits
   Carefully look at whether you’re eating unbalanced meals centered on a specific food, whether you’re getting the right level of nutrition, how much your eating, and how quickly you’re eating.
2. Eat Slowly
   Eating slowly eases the burden on your digestive organs and helps them process food more efficiently.
3. Eat Regularly
   It’s important to eat regular meals to manage your health. It’s good to set definite times, if possible, to supply your body with nutrients, like the sun rising in the morning and setting in the evening.
4. Eat Less
   Just because the food you’re eating is good does not mean that eating a lot and more frequently is good for your body. Stop eating a meal when you feel eighty percent full, and unless you do manual labor, you may only need to eat two full meals a day.
5. Fast Occasionally
   By stopping your food intake every once in a while, you not only let your body rest completely, but you get an opportunity to watch yourself as you control your desires. We all need practice escaping from our attachments, because sooner or later, the time will come when we have to let go of everything, even our bodies. So we sometimes need that kind of training, too. If we do mind-body training, though, we become charged with energy, so then skipping a meal won’t seem like a big deal.
6. Choose Specific Flavors to Strengthen Specific Organs
   Each flavor has an effect on a specific organ. Salty flavors strengthen the kidneys, sweet flavors the stomach, sour flavors the liver, and bitter flavors the heart. If you’re feeling nauseous, eating something bitter will settle and calm your stomach.
7. Do Mind-Body Training
   By connecting mind and body, consistently practicing methods such as yoga, qigong, and Brain Education changes your food preferences to cleaner, healthier foods.
8. Listen to Your Body
   We actually have within us a sense for distinguishing which foods are healthy and which are unhealthy. But many people tend to eat indiscriminately because their sense for food has been dulled by their living environment or habits. Once your sense for food becomes normal, your body will look for the food it needs and tell you when to eat as well. So you should eat according to this sense instead of being confused about the contradictory diet advice available. That sense is revived by mind-body training.

Mindful Eating Exercise

In addition to the recommendations above, I’d like to suggest practicing this mindful eating exercise when you can. It will help you reduce stress during eating and efficiently get the most nutrients possible out of your food.

Close your eyes and direct your awareness inward. Isolating yourself from visual information in this way helps you pay better attention to your body. A large quantity of energy (blood and oxygen) is needed for food to be processed in your digestive organs. By decreasing your brain’s activity when you close your eyes, you prevent energy from being wasted, which makes it available for digestion.

Chew each bite of food thoroughly as you eat, about thirty to fifty times, while focusing your mind on your lower abdomen. A lot of saliva, which contains digestive enzymes, may fill your mouth, and you may feel your thoughts subside more and more with each mouthful.

People who have poor digestive function, including stomach problems, become healthier when they eat this way for just three months.

What’s most important for improving your eating habits is developing your sense of your body. Those who cultivate a deeper awareness of their body develop a healthy constitution, and, from then on, eating what they want and like ends up being best for maintaining their health.

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