Practice Eating With Joy

Expand your relationship with food, while learning to appreciate, savor and bring a whole lot of enjoyment to your meals.

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People often ask me, when is the best time to bring mindfulness into your day and aside from saying, “anytime,” a great way to integrate mindfulness is with something we all have to do – eat!

Bringing mindfulness to eating can help you expand your relationship with food, while allowing you to appreciate, savor and bring a whole lot of enjoyment to your meals.

Explore these three mindful tips. In practice, these tips only take a minute or two of your time before a meal—well worth the sense of enjoyment they bring.

Bring these three mindful tips into eating your snacks and meals from time to time and see what you notice.

When you sit down to your food:

  1. Take it in with your eyes: As soon as you get your food take in the sight of it, the colors, the shapes, the richness that may be there. And if there’s not richness there, maybe you want to add a couple things, a couple more colors to be in there to make it richer in some way.
  2. Take in the aromas: Take a few deep inhales of the smell of the food. Breathe in. Breathe out. Experience the aromas for a moment.
  3. Sense the interconnection: The third thing, and perhaps one of the most important things, is take a moment to think about everything that went into producing that food in front of you: the people, the nature, the rain, the sun, the earth, including you who purchased it. Sense that interconnection between what is there in front of you with all that’s involved in getting your food to you.
  4. Savor what arises. See if what arises is a natural implicit sense of appreciation and gratitude and if so allow yourself to savor that feeling for a few moments, and then take your first bite.
    Bon appetite!