Have you ever sat down with a bowl of ice cream and a few minutes later the whole tub was gone? What about sitting down to watch a movie and accidentally eating a whole package of oreos or chips? A lot of times this happens because of boredom or stress eating which are all connected to mindless eating behaviors that negatively impact our health and fitness goals.

The good news is there are plenty of simple strategies that work to get control of mindless eating patterns that block your health and fitness progress.

Why Is Mindful Eating So Important?

It is important to get into the habit of mindful eating so that you are thinking about the food you are fueling your body with and you don’t overeat the wrong foods. Being aware of what you eat and when you eat will make sure you don’t fall into careless eating habits that negatively impact your health goals. By developing more awareness of your food intake you’ll be better able to manage what kind of food you are putting into your body, and learn to avoid the mindless eating habits that lead to weight gain and disease as well as mental or emotional distress.

Mindful Eating Strategy #1: Identify Your “Hot-State’ Triggers

There are a couple big factors that affect how fast we lose and gain weight. One of the main ones for many clients is stress, or what behavior researchers call “hot-states’. When in a hot-state, emotions tend to defeat any logical reasoning and instead cause you to make emotionally-based decisions. This state can be dangerous for your diet and your health so it is important to find what triggers your hot-states so that you are prepared when one comes on and you can prevent it before it even happens.

Mindful Eating Strategy #2: Use Awareness to Shift to Calming Behaviors

A couple signs that a hot-state is about to come on can be anxiety or faster breathing. Writing down what your triggers are and teaching yourself to recognize them will help you avoid these hot states by building an awareness continuum. Once you build an awareness continuum and you are fully aware of your triggers, you can learn to take a time-out or a breather which will help these hot-states not escalate into harmful emotional eating.

Using timeouts or breathing exercises has been found by researchers to be very effective protection against hot-states that wreck your healthy diet and fitness behaviors. In a study at the University of California at San Francisco, researchers randomly assigned chronically stressed overweight and obese women to 9 weekly sessions (lasting two and a half hours each) of mindfulness training and practice, where they learned stress reduction and awareness techniques. Additionally, the women in the mindfulness group were asked to meditate for thirty minutes a day.

The control group received no mindfulness training. Although no diets were prescribed, both groups did attend one session about the basics of healthy eating and exercise. Then, the researchers measured the participants’ psychological stress, fat, deep abdominal fat, weight, and cortisol levels before and after the four-month study. The link they found was clear: when women’s cortisol (stress hormone) levels went down, so did their abdominal fat levels.”

Mindful Eating Strategy #3: Eliminate Uncertainty from Your Goals

Now that you know about hot-states, it is important to understand the next big factor that will affect your health and fitness and that is the certainty of your goal. According to Behavior Modification author Claire Dorotik-Nana, “When the future of long-term goals is uncertain, we engage in what is called ‘risk discounting’, which means that when we weigh up the risks of the short-term consequences (such as eating an entire bag of candy at your desk or an entire bag of chips before dinner), we discount the impact they will have on our long-term goals.”

So how do you set health goals that you actually believe you can achieve, and then achieve them? The first step is to review your goals and determine how realistic your health and fitness goals really are. “According to a New England Journal of Medicine editorial titled Losing Weight: An Ill-Fated New Year’s Resolution, most people do not believe they can successfully lose weight”.

So the key strategy for mindful eating success is to get real about your goals which look like this: “I will lose 40 pounds in the next couple of months” vs. “I will lose 1 pound a week for the next 40 weeks”. The second goal doesn’t sound as exciting but it is realistic and sets you up for mindful eating success which means achievable weight loss and fitness goals.

Mindful Eating Strategy #4: Learn How to Set Smarter Goals

Once you get real about your goals it’s time to learn to set smarter health and fitness goals that you feel confident about achieving because here again research has found that someone who has more confidence that they can achieve their goal will not give in to temptations or mindless eating behaviors and is evidently more likely to reach their target.

A good way to get started with smart goal setting is to assess where you are. Get your journal out and begin by tracking your current weight, body fat, measurements, daily meals, beverages, fitness habits, health issues, etc. Our 3 Day Detox Plan includes tracking sheets that help you track all of this and more. The next step is after you assess is to setup a realistic plan.

Need help with more personalized assessments, diet and fitness plans. Be sure to contact me to setup your consult or get started with my free download here: Fit Healthy Body Quick Start Guide

Setting up a realistic plan to begin your health and fitness transformation will become so much easier after you assess. You will be able to set a weight target and deadline that is realistic and a workout schedule that is reasonable and from there you can begin to form a blueprint like the ones clients use that will get you to your target with more mindfulness of your behaviors so those behaviors become permanent and you can get off the weight loss weight gain roller coaster.