Read Next

Eating Dirty Food as a Clean Eater

I'm sitting outside the Viking Museum in Oslo Norway. The museum is closed, but the little ice cream stand in the otherwise empty parking lot is still open. I'm on my third ice cream.

Eating ice cream in Norway is about as nonsensical as it gets. The ice creams are the crappy kind you find in freezer chests at truck stops. Norway is the most expensive country on the Big Mac index (and easily the most expensive country I've ever visited), so each ice cream costs around $4 US. It's not really warm here. Oh-- and I don't usually eat ice cream.

When I travel in new countries for short periods of time, say under a week, I allow myself to eat anything and everything. I do poorly with grey areas, so my diet is either 100% on or 100% off (although some things, like soda and margarine, are so offensive that I never eat them). It's usually 100% on, but I recognize that with two or three days in a country, my time may not be best spent scouting around for a decently healthy restaurant. Also, I'm pragmatic enough to know that a few days of eating crap food probably won't affect my long term health.

Tips for Eating Mindfully

On Radical Reader Chinese

As much as we hate to admit it, health is a big deal in our lives. If not trying to craft a perfect beach body I think that most of us want to feel healthy. Instrumental to that is eating. Our food choices directly effect how we look and feel in a big way and, you may have guessed it, we can be helped in our food-ing by mindfulness.

The essence of mindfulness is paying attention. Many of us will likely agree that one of the places that we need to pay attention is our meal times. Food selections are one part of the equation and I imagine we all do a decent job at that. Even if we don't make "good" food choices on the regular I'm sure that most of us at least recognize that we don't eat healthy.

While mindful food selection is incredibly important, and worthy of a completely different blog post dedicated to it, I will be focusing on method rather than substance here. What does that mean? Well, rather than making healthy food choices lets work with the food that we already eat to try and pay attention to how we eat it. Here are a couple of things that have worked for me.

Eat Slowly Many of you have probably already heard this one, which is good because it is a great tip. We have pretty darn big servings in this country and eat far more than we should as a result. Combine that with the fact that it takes your stomach a while to realize that it is full and you're very likely to over eat. So, try and stretch your food out over the course of maybe half an hour. Take a couple bites, and put the food down for just a bit. If you have to watch the clock and wait a couple of minutes between bites then that works perfectly. I think odds are you will be surprised by how little food you have before you are actually satisfactorily full.

Only eat Essence of mindfulness right here, that is only doing one thing. When you eat, don't do anything else. Also, when you are doing something don't have food around. I used to have this terrible munching tendency where I would get bored and eat. It wasn't really even a conscious thing. I would be sitting there with some trail mix on my desk and I would just scarf it down. Now, trail mix isn't too bad for you but if you polish off a full eight serving bag of it that's when things get a little unhealthy. Just keep the food out of arms length and you won't idly eat it.

Rendering New Theme...