Mindfulness meditation involves paying attention to thoughts and emotions without becoming involved with them, thus helping reduce emotional eating. Although mindfulness has proven itself an effective tool in curbing emotional eating, its practice needs time for it to become an integral part of everyday life.
Researchers have shown that mindfulness training can assist in decreasing problematic cravings related to eating and weight gain. More specifically, studies suggest that training in mindfulness can weaken the association between mood and eating during the day.
Identify Your Triggers
Many individuals with eating disorders find themselves overwhelmed by strong food cravings that are hard to resist, often driven by emotions. Emotional eaters may believe they are powerless over these cravings and that willpower is simply not sufficient for conquering them; learning to recognize emotional triggers could be key in successfully combatting them.
Mindfulness is an approach that encourages individuals to become mindful of their thoughts, feelings and sensations in order to take active control over their behaviors, rather than believing cravings are too strong for them to resist. Recognizing what drives your urges to eat may help you manage them effectively and stop emotional eating for good.
Mindfulness may appear simple in theory, but its application in real life situations can be challenging. This is particularly evident when trying to maintain a healthy diet – but being ready for these obstacles beforehand will only increase success!
If certain foods make your stomach upset or bloated, keeping a journal and keeping track of these causes would be useful. An elimination diet involves gradually eliminating one or more food groups to see which cause symptoms.
Recent research revealed that practicing mindfulness meditation regularly improves your emotional and behavioral reactions to food cues. This is because mindfulness practice disengages any link between your mood and food cues, helping resist impulses to snack.
Stress can play a large part in emotional and unhealthy eating habits. Work-related, family or personal stressors can all have an adverse impact on eating patterns, leading to binging and overeating. Mindfulness techniques may help by keeping you focused in the present moment while accepting uncomfortable feelings as part of an overall solution for managing stress.
Integrating mindfulness principles can be helpful for anyone trying to lose weight, including those who have undergone bariatric surgery. For maximum effect, use various tools that help avoid unhealthy food temptation, including identifying triggers, managing your stress levels, getting support and using hunger reality checks.
Tame Your Stress
If stress is driving you towards more sugary, salty or fat-laden food items, reducing it may help curb cravings. Effective strategies include getting enough sleep, taking up an interesting hobby and exercising regularly (exercise gets blood flowing while helping produce feel-good chemicals called endorphins in your body – try 30 minutes of aerobic activity three to four times each week for maximum results).
Mindfulness practices provide a way to become aware of experiences without judgment in the moment and promote greater self-regulation. Research has also indicated that mindfulness practice reduces stress reactivity and may decrease negative mood associations with food cravings (Hoge et al. 2019).
Mindfulness-based interventions, delivered via app on smartphones or tablets, teach participants strategies for responding to food cues, emotions and cravings in a healthy manner that support healthy eating habits. Research demonstrates their success at decreasing overeating of all severity ranging from problematic binge eating to emotional eating.
One recent study utilized multilevel models to better understand how mindfulness training could influence cravings, using multilevel models to assess within-person associations between mood and food cravings before and after a mindful eating intervention. They discovered that at an individual level, higher levels of negative mood were linked with stronger food cravings prior to attending mindfulness training; however, following mindfulness training, this correlation became significantly weaker.
Researchers suggest that the observed change could be explained by a decrease in pain-related craving sensations and urgency to respond. Their intention-to-treat and treatment efficacy analyses showed that mindfulness interventions reduced these associations with effect sizes ranging from medium to large.
The Eat Right Now mindful eating intervention provided participants with skills for adapting to food cravings more adaptively, such as accepting cravings without reacting, using distractions to delay urge to eat, and differentiating between experiences of hunger and emotions and their responses to those experiences. Participants could access new lessons daily; previous ones were available for reference anytime during or after program completion. Studies have demonstrated this approach leads to lasting changes in eating behavior with improvements lasting weeks or months post program completion.
Have a Hunger Reality Check
Cravings can be hard to overcome when trying to lose weight. Switching from junk food to healthy choices like vegetables and broiled fish might seem daunting at first, or feeling full after meals may prove challenging. Thankfully, recent research indicates that mindful eating and other behavioral therapies may help decrease craving-related eating while helping individuals stick with healthier diets.
First step to effectively managing hunger is recognizing when your hunger is being caused by other things such as boredom or anger. Emotional or stress-related hunger tends to manifest more frequently when dieters try to lose weight; eating can become habitual or provide comforting relief from any unaddressed feelings. True physical hunger often arrives slowly with other bodily sensations such as stomach growls, fatigue or headache.
Decentering and visualisation techniques of mindfulness can help you identify true hunger based on its distinctive symptoms, such as the presence of stomach grumbles or wanting high-fiber foods. A recent study demonstrated how decentering strategies significantly decreased food cravings by diverting attention away from associated thoughts and mental imagery that accompany food cravings.
Participants using the app to assess their bodies and emotions could then use an interactive ‘Want-O-Meter’ button, which provided them with a customized mindfulness exercise designed to reduce urges. They could then choose from among various other tools available for managing cravings – for example eating mindfully or engaging in an acceptance exercise to address emotional needs.
Findings of this research indicate that mindfulness interventions’ effectiveness in reducing food cravings depend on their design. Future studies should examine causal relationships and compare various mindfulness strategies in order to establish which ones are most successful in decreasing cravings. It would also be useful to measure actual intake and examine how their efficacy may vary based on factors like an individual’s level of cravings, motivation level and personality characteristics as well as environmental conditions.
Get Support
Emotional hunger often leads to mindless eating, making mindfulness practice essential. Mindfulness involves becoming aware of all your thoughts, emotions and sensations without judgement or bias. Jon Kabat-Zinn, creator of the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) technique, advises approaching reality without judgment – even when it may be uncomfortable. Mindfulness training has been shown to enhance self-awareness and decrease anxiety levels. Mindful meditation helps people manage difficult feelings more easily, such as cravings. A 2021 study demonstrated this by tracking participants of an eight-week mindful eating intervention who experienced decreased emotional and problem eating behaviors.
Mindfulness can help you pause before responding to cravings, giving yourself time to consider all your options. If you aren’t physically hungry, try waiting a few minutes before snacking. If the urge remains strong, ask yourself what other activities might fulfill emotional needs without resorting to food; these might include calling up someone who always makes you laugh, going for a walk with the dog, playing with your pet or looking at photos of something important from your past.
As part of your support system, having access to licensed therapists who can offer practical and healthy solutions for cravings and other emotional issues that could be contributing to unhealthy eating is vital. BetterHelp’s online therapy service matches you up with these professional therapists who can offer help for cravings or any issues contributing to unhealthy eating patterns.
There is much discussion of introducing more structure into our lives, from diets and exercises, through to travel plans and business ventures. But perhaps none are as significant as finding time for themselves – either alone, with family and friends or taking time off work and going back into education or the workplace to study something they already know. A recent randomized trial of an app-delivered mindfulness-based relapse prevention (MBRP) program found that formal and informal mindfulness practices helped moderate cravings between sessions, leading to less substance use than with cognitive-behavioral therapy or treatment as usual control groups. Remission resilience increased compared with treatment-as-usual controls groups. The findings are especially noteworthy given that prior studies tended to focus on mindfulness-based interventions alongside other therapeutic strategies. However, this study exclusively examined mindfulness manipulations so researchers could more confidently attribute any effects to that specific component. More research needs to be conducted into its independent effects on craving.