One of the tools you can use when you are starting to work on mindful eating and
healing your relationship with food, is to track how much you eat and what you eat. This
is not meant to control what you eat, but instead to be used in conjunction with your
mindful eating journey.
To Track How Mindful Eating is Helping With Your Food Issues
An excellent reason to start tracking what you are eating while mindful eating is
because you can actually see at what point mindful eating begins helping you. For
example, if you have been writing in your journal every day during your mindful meals
about the experience, you might notice that you aren’t focusing so much on the quality
of your food, but little details you noticed.
Or maybe you added some journal entries where you caught yourself being more
mindful even with distractions, or how much easier it was getting to focus on your
eating, instead of other things.
To Make You Aware of Your Eating Habits
You might have some bad eating habits without realizing it, but they become more
apparent with mindful eating. Maybe when writing down why you chose a specific food
or what your intention for that meal was, you discovered a lot of them are from being
bored and not actually hungry, or that you tend to have certain types of foods when you
are sad or under a lot of stress.
Everything about your eating habits is important to record, including what you eat, when
you eat during the day, what inspires you to eat, how you feel when you are hungry or
feel, when you tend to overeat, and so many more details. They should all be written
down.
To See Your Growth with Your Relationship with Food
Mindful eating is also amazing at helping you to work on your relationship with food,
which tends to become toxic after a series of dieting or restricting your food or
quantities. By tracking your food and mindful eating process, you will discover a lot
about yourself, similar to your eating habits, but so much more.
You might even see when you begin transitioning to having a healthy relationship with
food and much less anxiety or fears about certain types of foods. Don’t forget nothing
you feel or experience is wrong, but it is good to work on yourself, your motivations, and
why you have this relationship with food that you have.
