Mindful Eating

Abstract

Excess weight continues to exact high costs at the individual, national, and global levels. Traditional methods used to reduce excess weight and promote healthy weight regulation have not been overly successful. Therefore, rigorous quantitative and qualitative research is needed to assess emerging and alternative approaches to determine effective strategies to confront this public health challenge. One such approach is applying mindfulness, or a nonjudgmental acceptance of living in the moment, to eating. Mindful eating is a nonjudgmental acceptance of physical and emotional feelings while eating or in an eating environment. Mindful eating constructs include recognizing one’s own cues of physical hunger and satiety in order to make decisions about what food and how much to eat, choosing foods that are nutritious and pleasurable, not participating in other activities while eating, and knowing the consequences of unmindful eating. The nascent mindful eating literature shows success in increasing mindfulness and promising but less robust outcomes with anthropometric biomarkers of healthy weight regulation. Mindful eating is an emerging healthy weight regulation approach that has the potential to address the challenges clients and patients experience with healthy weight regulation, but additional research is needed to confirm which health outcomes will be consistently affected.