What is Mindful Eating?

At our retreats we get many people coming with a big list of questions about nutrition. People would ask is coconut water good for you? Is falafel good for you? Are vegan ready meals good for you? is eating meat good for you? Are smoothies good for you? And our host would listen to all of the questions and thank them for taking the time to formulate them. Then she would sit quietly and say I have 3 answers…

When you choose to eat something think of these 3 things

1. Is it close to the source?
2. Everything in moderation
3. How does it make you feel?

It was the best piece of nutritional advice I have ever heard. It’s simple – Stay close to the source (real food), don’t over eat or consume anything in particular and if it makes you feel good after eating it, it probably is good for you!

When you connect yourself to the process of what eating essentially is which is feeding our very precious bodies nutrition to help us function and survive, it’s pretty clear that food that has been manipulated is going to be unhealthier. FULL STOP.

It is a scientific fact that as soon as you cut a vegetable it looses its nutrients and the longer it has been left the fewer nutrients it has…. So if your food has been made in some warehouse and sat for hours and then manipulated, then covered with sauce with preservatives, then packaged in plastic or foil, then delivered to a huge supermarket then sat in a fridge and finally picked by you and eventually ended up on your plate after been blasted in the microwave (Don’t even get me started on that microwaves) Well yeah…chances are you may as well be eating cardboard.

Example; paying £3-4 for a smoothie, coconut water (which mostly are full of sugars in any case) or Coffee (generally made with cheap cows milk pumped full of hormones) I mean coffee contains caffeine that unbalances your mood, it brings you up to bring you crashing down… why bother? OK, OK, I hear you! But lets take a minute to think about our food habits.

Years and years of pumping our bodies full of this stuff, will have an effect on our health our chemistry, our brains our bodies?

Your body is a temple, feed is with love and nutrients, the less manipulated food is the better, chop a carrot, become part of the experience of your food, its like turning up to your life, In all areas, make an effort to actually acknowledge what you are eating, has it graced the land? Has it been kissed by the sun? And if it hasn’t maybe you shouldn’t be eating it.

As the wonderful Thich Nhat Hanh once said – When we choose to eat mindfully, we are in touch with the essence of life, the now, the present, we are real and this piece of bread is real and this moment is true life. It helps us become truly present. It is a miracle, I am here, I am alive, and it’s a miracle that this piece of bread has come to me, to nourish me, turn eating into a small a ritual of gratitude a moment to focus on nothing else but the food and the appreciation of our life and abundance.