What’s Enough?

Hello, and welcome to lesson 6 of Mindful Eating. Today, we're going to be talking about listening to your body to determine how much food is enough. Mindful eaters learn to use both internal cues and compassion to answer the question, how much food is enough in this moment? When we eat for reasons besides physical need, we tend to overeat, because food alone cannot satisfy all of our emotional needs. So, how do you know when it's time to stop eating? As the stomach fills with food and expands, nerve receptors send signals to the brain. This makes us feel full. In addition to our physical fullness, our bodies remember how past meals and snacks made us feel. We can use this sensory memory to determine how much to eat the next time. For instance, if you ate a whole bag of chips in one sitting last month, and your body didn't feel good afterwards, it wouldn't ask for quite so many chips next time. But if you have ignored your fullness signals for a long time, determining how much food is enough might be challenging at first. The good news is, it is possible to relearn. A great place to begin to relearn this lesson is at the table. Halfway through your meal, take a moment to check in with your body and see if you're still hungry. You might decide you've had enough, even if there is still food on the plate. Give yourself permission to stop or to continue eating based on awareness of taste, hunger, and satisfaction....