More About Mindful Eating…

Mindful Eating is a big topic because we all engage in it in some way, every day. The key is to consciously make eating choices that align with your body’s needs and your values. But how can you know where you stand on this spectrum, and how can you eat more mindfully?

How We Define ‘Mindful Eating’

Let’s clarify – at Way, “mindful eating” doesn’t mean the rigid 1990s technique of holding each bite of food in your mouth for an exaggeratedly long time.

Instead, we focus on the collective awareness and ability to eat intuitively. This involves knowing what you value in life, like high energy or mental clarity, while listening to your body’s needs and mindfully choosing what to eat from a place of self-awareness and self-care.

From what we’ve found, this is best learned through a combination of Intuitive Eating principles, combined with specific behavior science techniques, and from a place of calm (aka in Parasympathetic Nervous System mode, not the Sympathetic Nervous System).

How Does Intuitive Eating Fit In With Mindful Eating?

Intuitive Eating organizes 10 principles around mindful eating. It encourages choosing food intentionally and without the influence of diet culture and unrealistic body standards.

We’ve all seen restrictive diets fail someone in our life – they have an 83% failure rate, so if you haven’t experienced directly, then you almost certainly know someone who has experienced the failure of restrictive diets – repeatedly most likely. That’s why the first principle of Intuitive Eating is to “reject the diet mentality.

The Promise of Mindful Eating

The promise of mindful eating is a way of living and eating that’s unique to your own life, your own body, your own values, and is easy for you to apply, because it’s natural. By becoming more aware of the thoughts, emotions, and feelings behind your relationship with food and your relationship with your body image, you can explore how to have self-acceptance, warmth, compassion, and fluidly map to your Peace Point. That’s why we’ve made the Peace Point the central theme in our mindful eating app, Way.

When you know your Peace Point and have that picture in your mind, that you’ve created yourself, your thoughts and emotions and feelings naturally start to map to that picture, and what you choose to do, eat, and say follows those thoughts, emotions, and feelings, right to your fulfillment.

How Way App’s Pathways Guide You to Mindful Eating

Every Pathway in Way can be helpful in your Journey, it just depends where you’re starting from right now. Are you just starting to heal your relationship with food? Have you already started healing your relationship with food? Are you recovered from a disordered eating pattern? Are you still eating in a disordered way and looking for help?

The answer to these questions is the first step in getting you onto the right Pathway in the Way app. If body image and comparing your body to other peoples’ bodies (whether you know them directly or just see a picture of them on social media) is something you do daily or many times per day – you’re not alone. We find this is the most common trigger to falling into the trap of restrictive diets. That’s why we give a first Pathway Recommendation to the Mindful Shifts Pathway, which is specifically designed with sessions that help you unlearn the “perfect” body image that’s perpetuated by diet culture. Then, we guide you to reframe a new body image that’s more aligned with your values.

Way’s Emotional Eats Pathway was designed to help you flip the connotation of emotional eating as something you need to “fight” or “stop”, so you can explore how emotions influence eating, and that by accepting emotions, being compassionate with emotions, you can find more peace with food. Also, Body Feels Pathway’s purpose is to help you learn how to listen to your body – your body is talking through signals, so feel what it’s saying and it will be easier to give your body what it needs.

Start Your Journey to Mindful Eating, Today!

Join 10,000+ people who’ve started their journey. We’ve made it affordable at less than $10/month, because our mission is to make your health and happiness, and Way was named the 2023 Best Non Diet App by Healthline, the biggest health website on the internet.