Mindful Eating

The MB-EAT Mindful Eating Approach

The mindful eating approach we use at Tailored Nutrition is MB-EAT. It was developed by Jean Kristeller, the author of The Joy of Half a Cookie and is a dietetic approved course that is supported by NIH-funded research.

MB-EAT addresses:

• Mindless eating
• Stress-related eating
• Disordered eating patterns
• Obesity

It does this through the application of mindfulness meditation. Debbie Mason is a certified MB-EAT training instructor and completed her training in 2017.

Debbie’s Take on MB-EAT

“At last here is a programme that helps to truly bring an individual into a place of healthy, flexible, balanced, and guilt-free eating."

“At last here is a programme that helps to truly bring an individual into a place of healthy, flexible, balanced, and guilt-free eating.

“I have been teaching a balanced eating model for many years and I still believe that dietary guidelines are useful because they help us focus on the quality of our diet. With this information, we can certainly achieve great results. Plus, positive results are motivating!"

“However, in the long term, self-control often falters, and automatic eating habits can return. Automatic eating habits include eating too fast, mindlessly eating past the point of fullness, eating out of boredom, or eating in response to emotional triggers."

“Some people have lost the ability to feel full, while others never notice hunger. For some people, automatic eating includes eating because of emotional triggers where they experience periods of out of control eating.

“Believe it or not, we can get back in touch with our own body and emotions, changing the way we eat.

“This means we can blend sensible eating – eating for nourishment – yet still enjoy and celebrate the things that make our taste buds sing. The zing of a good cheese is an example, or a slice of decadent cake.

“Mindful eating is all about optimising the eating experience, cultivating your inner gourmet, and savouring your food in the moment. It also includes having an awareness of your unique taste preferences as well as your body’s hunger and fullness cues.”

How do we do this

The first step is to get you in tune with your body. You may have lost the ability to know when you are full, for example, or you need a simple retune. There are multiple tools in the MB-EAT mindful eating programme to tune you back in with your body’s cues.

Examples of the tools we use include:

• A ten-minute mindful meditation period per day. This is a refreshing, balancing, and relaxing experience that helps your mind become more aware. It’s also one of the most effective tools we use in the programme.
• Hunger awareness as well as recognising fullness and satiety. The latter is recognising when you have had enough to eat.
• Taste awareness exercises that help you reconnect to the pleasure of eating and also help you understand what you really like the taste of.

Have you noticed that you continue eating even after the taste enjoyment has gone?

It is common for people to only really enjoy the first three or four bites of very rich food. However, they either continue eating automatically or they try to chase the great flavour they experienced in the first three bites.

How much healthier and free would you be if you stopped eating when you were no longer really enjoying the food?

We all know that we can also over-eat, or binge eat, because of emotional reasons. At Tailored Nutrition, we can help you with this too by ensuring you recognise when you are emotionally eating as well as helping you understand your triggers.

A good starting point is to examine a recent emotional overeating episode. We will help you work backwards to identify the initial trigger. We’ll also review the many chain events over that day which caused the outcome of out of control eating.

Then we’ll equip you with the tools you need to minimise or halt that outcome from occurring again.